Four undergraduate-student-led startups will receive up to $10,000 in grant funding through Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures’ FastFoward U to pursue their business ideas, which range from safer in-home dialysis and bottled bubble tea.
Aquatas, Goba Tea, Relavo and Straythink were recently named as awardees of The Ralph S. O’Connor Undergraduate Entrepreneurship Fund, which supports undergraduate entrepreneurs. The startups also will have access to mentorship from investors and serial entrepreneurs and additional resources from FastForward U and JHTV.
FastForward U received 31 applications for the fund, made possible by a donation from John Hopkins alumnus Ralph S. O’Connor and his wife, Becky. Now in its fifth year, the O’Connor Fund has supported nearly two-dozen student teams.
“This was an extremely competitive funding cycle with numerous standout applications,” said Kerrie Carden, FastForward U’s director of student ventures. “We had more qualified teams than awards to give out, which is a testament to the hard work and dedication of our Hopkins undergrads.”
Kevin Carter, student venture coordinator for FastForward U, said the applications “highlight the breadth of innovation coming from Hopkins undergrads.”
“From medical devices to virtual reality to cryptocurrency to consumer goods, it’s all incredibly impressive,” he said.
Members of the 2018-2019 cohort met for an orientation dinner Nov. 29.
Aquatas
The team: Anish Mokha (KSAS ’20), Maya Foster (KSAS ’20), Varun Venkatesh (WSE ’20), Shivam Rastogi (WSE ’20), Zach Schmidt (WSE ’20) and Paarth Sharma (WSE ’20)
The product: An efficient and affordable water purification system for use in developing regions around the world.
Many water purification products on the market fail to filter out metal contaminants and salts, have low water output, require an external power source or are too expensive. Aquatas’ purification device is manually powered and can produce as much as a liter of water in three-and-a-half minutes. The device can be used by children or seniors, weighs 25 pounds and is the size of a small household trash can. It lasts up to 16 months and costs around $65 using readily available parts.
Aquatas’ prototype achieved a rejection rate of nearly 98 percent, and the company is working on pilot testing next spring in the hopes of making its first sales through a community center in Kenya.
Goba Tea
The team: Byron D’Mello (KSAS ’20), Noah Doris (Babson College)
The product: The first bottled bubble tea, infused with stress-reducing vitamins, for busy and stressed college students.
Self-described “bubble tea fanatics,” D’Mello and Doris fell in love with the drink as freshmen but saw fellow students driving up to a half-hour away for the tea, which must be sipped immediately.
D’Mello and Doris have been making their own bubble tea and selling it for a year-and-a-half at farmers’ markets and festivals. In the spring, they ran a two-month pilot program at Hopkins; after initially selling 270 bottles per week, they upped their supply to 350 bottles. Goba Tea is now available at 10 retail locations in Maryland, California, Florida and Massachusetts. Goba Tea signed contracts with four other universities over the summer and has received FDA approval for the beverage.
Goba Tea wants to do for bottled tea what Naked did for smoothies – bring the drink to the consumer rather than vice versa. The company is targeting universities and focusing sales at or near colleges, much like Insomnia Cookies.
Relavo
The team: Sarah Lee (WSE ’19), James Qin (WSE ’19), Anna Bailey (WSE ’19), Tejasvi Desai (WSE ’21), Eugene Oh (WSE ’21) and Giang Hoang (WSE ’21)
The product: The PeritoneX, a disinfection device that reduces the risk of infection during home peritoneal dialysis treatment.
More than 600,000 Americans are living with kidney failure, most of whom rely on hemodialysis, where the blood is taken out of the body to be cleaned. But more patients – currently 9 percent and growing – use peritoneal dialysis, where the blood is cleaned nightly inside the body by a solution administered via a catheter through the lining of the abdomen. While PD has been found to give patients a better quality of life than blood dialysis, because patients administer the dialysis to themselves, there is a higher risk of contamination of the tube ends during setup. The resulting infection, called peritonitis, occurs in 1-in-4 patients, requires hospitalization 60 percent of the time and is a primary factor in 1-in-6 PD patient deaths.
The PeritoneX aims to reduce touch contamination by disinfecting potentially contaminated PD connection points after connections have been made but before the initiation of dialysis treatment. The PeritoneX is small, affordable and disposable.
Dr. Alicia Neu, chief of pediatric nephrology at Johns Hopkins Hospital, serves as Relavo’s clinical sponsor.
Straythink
The team: Nikhil Baddam (KSAS ’21) and Owen Friesen (KSAS ’21)
The product: Haptic feedback gloves that make virtual reality more immersive.
Straythink wants to make touch come alive in what is often only an audiovisual virtual reality experience. VR gloves now in the marketplace use vibrations to stimulate the hand encountering an object. The glove being developed by Straythink, by contrast, uses selectiv stiffening rigidity, meaning the stiffness of the glove changes as the user “touches” objects.
More accurate touch in VR systems could be used by surgeons, soldiers and others who need to practice physically precise tasks.
Thanks in part to a Spark grant from FastForward U and a Digital daVinci Award from the Digital Media Center, Straythink was able to develop a single-finger prototyp, Straythink was able to develop a single-finger prototype of the glove earlier this year.
Click here to learn more about the Ralph S. O’Connor Undergraduate Entrepreneurship Fund!