2022 New Venture Competition Finalists
Social Ventures
Paths
Linda Mangera SMHS '22
Yasmine Dessouky
Paths provides a convenient way for housing-voucher recipients to search for nearby homes with welcoming landlords. It follows the user’s movements alongside the local government housing database to present available housing options. Paths aims to reduce the rates of expired housing vouchers due to overcrowded existing marketplaces and landlord discrimination.
POP!
Anna Shah GWSB '24
Maya Levine CCAS '23
Stephanie Cheung CCAS '22
Rachel Cohen CCAS '23
POP! (Power of the Purse) is a pop-up thrift store that has generated $12,000 in revenue by selling secondhand, fashionable and affordable clothing to GW students. We reduce textile waste by promoting a circular economy and hope to broaden our impact by scaling to DC universities by franchising POP!.
Lōpe Tree
Lauren Servin GWSB '24
Ruth Dwyer GWSB '23
Once used in Ancient Egypt, Lōpe harnesses oil from the Desert Date tree in Northern Uganda to meet the growing global demand for efficacious, clean skincare, while establishing a new model which shares high-end retail profits with people who work on its supply chain and protects the forest.
PickMeUp
Katie Fernberg CCAS '22
Krista Minas CCAS '22
Hannah Froimson SEAS '22
PickMeUp is a social venture that will shape college students’ lives for the better. Beginning with George Washington University, PickMeUp will be the leading mental health app on college campuses. PickMeUp will connect students with the mental health resources that they need as they navigate their transition to college life.
Technology Ventures
Rugged Redemption
Sarah Malinowski SEAS '23
Tanner Reinholtz
Rugged Redemption is a prosthetic knee device meant for active transfemoral amputees, specifically Veterans. This device will allow users to run and walk for long distances and on uneven terrain. This will let these active people regain their lifestyle without having to manually change or adjust their knee.
PIR Prevention Systems
Sam Smith SMHS '25
PIR Prevention Systems has designed a device that tracks patient movement using several cloth-attachable motion sensors that wirelessly transmit to a bedside monitor. The device alerts staff of patient immobility to prevent pressure injury formation in nursing homes with the goal of saving nursing homes money and preventing suffering.
Currant
Ashwath Narayanan CCAS '22
Ellie Artone ESUA '23
Vidyut Ghuwalewala
Jasmine McCarton
Currant is a platform that matches brands with influencers on TikTok to grow revenue, awareness and scale their business. Our platform is focused on finding brands the right influencer fit through a combination of quantitative and content analysis.
Narrative
Trevor Doucet GWSB '22
Olivia Wilcox GWSB '22
Chelsea Sutch GWSB '22
Narrative is a peer-to-peer story non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace that enables individuals and organizations to mint audible historical moments, events, and ideas while monetizing them on the blockchain.
New Ventures
Clebby's
Sabrina Clebnik GWSB '22
Clebby’s is a cannabis-infused baking mix brand launching into the legal cannabis market. Prolonged third-party testing timeframes for THC dosage and strength makes selling fresh-baked edibles in dispensaries impossible. Clebby’s eliminates testing latency by providing customers the ability to bake fresh, delicious, cannabis-infused products with dosage consistency at home.
SurgCycle
Ameen Khalil SMHS '24
SurgCycle introduces surgical metal and biohazard waste recycling solutions, revolutionizing the field of medical waste disposal as we know it. Using gasifier technology and a streamlined operational model, we aim to drastically cut the unnecessary wasteful nature of the healthcare industry, which accounts for 10% of the US's carbon emissions.
ByLil
Lily Khosrowshahi GWSB '22
ByLil Bikinis is redesigning the bikini world; by creating reversible and versatile pieces, ByLil offers bikini-wearers the chance to transform one bikini into several looks, for the price of one - it’s “just a lil’ you.”
Asthguard
Jordan Shock SMHS '25
Jacob Diaz SMHS '25
Johhny Davoodifard SMHS '25
Grey Madison SMHS '25
Arash Agharahmanian SMHS '25
Current interventions in the treatment of asthma focus primarily on the prevention of exacerbations and control of symptoms. Asthguard seeks to identify allergens shown to be involved in the development of childhood asthma in the home of expectant parents in order to prevent its onset.