Students will compete for top honors in the third annual Rice Undergraduate Venture Challenge, a business plan competition to be held Thursday, May 3, at 1:30 p.m. in the Shell Auditorium of the Jones Graduate School of Business.  

Students will present business plans for new technology ventures. The competition was founded in 2010 by CoRE (Community of Rice Entrepreneurs), an undergraduate club. The campus-wide competition is open to all Rice undergraduates and is sponsored by the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship, the Rice Center for Engineering Leadership (RCEL), the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK), the Rice University Student Association, the Indo-American Charity Foundation, Rice Engineering Alumni, AlphaDev, and Schlumberger.

More than 25 judges from the Houston business and investment community will evaluate the presentations and select the winners based on the viability of their technology and the potential market and feasibility of the business plan.

The teams competing this year are Audio For All, Breath Alert, FluProof, Ice Owls, Impossible Challenges, O3, Respiratory Aides, Scan At Home, Stressed Out Seniors, and Wisga, LLC. The grand prize winner will receive $4,000; second place, $2,000; third place, $1,000; best pitch, $500.

“The RUVC is a key component of the `entrepreneurship pipeline’ we are building for undergraduates. Students test their ideas at the November Elevator Pitch Competition and receive honest feedback from judges on their commercial potential. With expert mentoring from the Rice Alliance, they refine their ideas into full business plans for the RUVC,” said Mark Embree, director of RCEL and professor of computational and applied mathematics.   

The managing director of Rice Alliance, Brad Burke, said, “The event was created to expose engineering students to the process of commercializing the technologies they create. We hope some of these projects move forward and result in the formation of new start-up ventures.”