Engineering students take top prize in student startup finale

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A team of engineering students earned first place at The Ohio State University Best of Student Startups (BOSS) Finale in mid-November. Computer science and engineering majors Ben Davis, Ryder Kemper and Ben Ware, founders of Insiderviz, have developed a free, easy and visual solution for investors to analyze insider trading data.

Ben Ware, Ben Davis, Ryder Kemper
Ware, Davis and Kemper after their winning pitch

As the winning team, Insiderviz is awarded $2,000 to support their business venture and an automatic invitation to be one of 11 groups to present at the spring 2023 President’s Buckeye Accelerator Pitch Finale, including completing the pre-accelerator Boost Camp. Six student ventures will be chosen for the year-long President’s Buckeye Accelerator and advance their startup for launch with a $50,000 award.

“There’s a big knowledge gap that we want to help address,” said Ware during the team’s BOSS Finale presentation. “This data really is valuable.”

According to the team, the Insiderviz website can help fill that knowledge gap for investors looking for more data sources to inform their investments.

Davis said he and his teammates struggled to find insider investor data online. Other sources “were opaque, hard to use, they weren't visual, and worst of all they were often paywalled. We wanted to make a better way, so we built Insiderviz.”

The team aims to make insider trading understandable, visual and accessible for everyone, and to create a generation of confident investors that are armed with accurate and meaningful financial data. Watch their pitch presentation.

Prior to the finale, 42 teams participated in the Keenan Center for Entrepreneurship’s BOSS interactive workshops, covering topics such as problem identification, customer validation, market research and more. The finale featured the top six individuals and teams pitching their ideas in under seven minutes to a panel of expert judges.

“The BOSS program is a vital part of our continuum of programs to advance an entrepreneurial mindset in Ohio State students from all majors and all of our campuses,” said Cheryl Turnbull, senior director of the Keenan Center for Entrepreneurship. “When we can give our students access to mentoring and knowledge resources, we’re empowering them to elevate and refine the ideas, passions and solutions already inside of them.”

Other BOSS finalists also benefitted from engineering student participation. Runner-up SmileChild includes Pranav Chati and David King. The team's novel incentive-based educational mobile app is designed to reduce disparities in infant mortality rates by bringing both accessible and quality educational resources to a caregiver’s fingertips. People’s Choice Awardee MyoGlove includes Maariyah Ahmed, Liam Burns, Corey Chiou, Erin Cowen, Cecilia Groves, Max Makar, Keyan Matar and Louie Melargno. Mel Gunawardena, Karthick Sivasubramanian and John Wu comprised the ClassGuard team, David Novikov was part of the De-Distracted Driving team, and Sidney McLean was a Mycolite Solutions team member.

Learn more about the BOSS Finale and teams here.

Categories: StudentsAwards