Thank you to all finalists for your well-presented pitches at yesterday's pitch event. 

For those that couldn't tune in to yesterday's winner announcement, after a truly close deliberation session (so close that it was down to the wire), judges selected the following three teams to be awarded a $100,000 prize to further their research and development, in conjunction with the insights gleaned from this experience:

  1. Getting down to BiNIS by Bryan Emmett, Claire Philips, Ryan Hayes, Rod Venterea, and Florence Sessoms
  2. Harvesting Agriculture’s “Natural” Insect Farms by Alexandra Chaskopoulou, Lee Cohnstaedt, Kiki Zinoviadou, Annie Donoughue, Brenda Oppert, and Komala Arsi
  3. Enhancing Rainfall with Charged Water Droplets by Dan Martin, Arquimedes Ruiz-Columbie, Jonathan Jennings, Craig Funke, George Bomar, and Tony Vaz

Alongside these well-deserving winners were the other incredibly innovative and insightful teams that filled out all of the pitch sessions. One team in particular that stood out to our panel as worthy of an honorable mention is...

  1. Healthy Floral Microbes = Healthy Crops and Bees by Caitlin Rering, Natalia Peres, and Patricio Muñoz