Penn Engineers Shine at Venture Lab Startup Challenge

On Friday, more than half a dozen Penn Engineering startups demonstrated their growth potential by participating in the University’s annual Venture Lab Startup Challenge.

The finals took place in Tangen Hall — a partnership by the Wharton School, Penn Engineering, and the Stuart Weitzman School of Design to consolidate Penn’s startup ecosystem and to provide experiential learning to all Penn students — in front of a live audience of dozens of faculty, staff, alumni, family members and friends.

Each team had five minutes to present their vision to a panel of five alumni judges, who then asked pointed questions about everything from go-to-market strategies to the assumptions underlying revenue projections.

Sponsored by Penn alumni, the competition provides essential support for student startups, and over the years, many of the graduating students have passed up job offers to continue working on their ventures.

This year’s winners included:

Cloak

Protecting Publishers from AI

Every day, software designed by leading AI companies crawls the web, capturing content on news sites to feed data to chatbots.

As the founders of Cloak — Rishi Ambavanekar (M&T’29) and Tyler Sacharow (C’29) — put it, that’s essentially a form of theft: Publishers not only have no way to charge money for their content, but also lose out on advertising revenue.

For developing a way to encrypt text-based content, such that AI crawlers can’t read it, but human customers can, Cloak won the $75,000 Perlman Grand Prize, the $10,000 Robert S. Blank New Venture Collaboration Award and the $10,000 Frederick H. Gloeckner Undergraduate Award.

The startup is already in talks with publishers like the New York Times and The Atlantic, as well as leading industry organizations like the Authors Guild, to deploy the technology.

Serpent Robotics

Making Tree Trimming Safer

Trimming trees is one of the most dangerous jobs in America, but also one of the most essential, especially when it comes to branches adjacent to power lines and other utilities.

Serpent Robotics is developing a robot that can climb trees and trim branches while its human operators stay on the ground, making the job not only safer, but easier, too.

Named a finalist for the second year in a row, the team — also a winner of this year’s President’s Innovation Prize — took home the $50,000 William G. Simpson and R. Drew Kistler Runner Up Prize, the $10,000 Weiss Audience’s Choice Award and the $10,000 Wharton Impact Climate Award. They also received a $50,000 Bridge Award from Venture Lab, which was announced during the Startup Challenge.

Run by Margaret Zhu (W’26), Steyn Knollema (IPD’26), Jason Li (IPD’26), Luca Cao (IPD’26), Jyotiraditya Ingawale (IPD’26) and Yiran Xuan (IPD’26), the startup is advised by Mark Yim, Asa Whitney Professor of Mechanical Engineering, among others.

Lucy

Invisible, Wearable AI

At present, accessing AI usually means typing (or voicing) a prompt into a desktop or mobile application. But what if you could wear AI, using a small device that connects to your phone, and speaks in a voice only you can hear?

For their work on Lucy, a nearly invisible AI wearable that goes behind the ear or the bottom molars, John Hopcroft (M&T’27) and Andrew Mao (M&T’26, GEng’27) won the $10,000 Khan Family AI for Business Award. They also received a $50,000 Bridge Award from Venture Lab, announced during the Startup Challenge.

Orble

Bubble Tea on Demand

Orble, a robotic micro-kitchen that prepares fresh, customizable beverages like boba and coffee on demand, won the Linn Family Innovation Prize, worth $10,000.

The group is led by current student Corina Chen (M&T’28) and Penn Engineering alumna Nastassja Kuznetsova (ENG’23, GEng’24).

One of the firm’s machines is installed in the Penn Engineering complex’s Accenture Cafe, where students can purchase a wide range of flavors, including taro and black milk tea.

Storiara

Using AI to Streamline Movie Productions

To plan movie shoots, producers must spend months scheduling and budgeting, before actors ever arrive on set. The process is extremely costly to get wrong: on studio films, a single day of shooting lost to logistical errors can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Enter Storiara, which uses AI to turn film scripts into production-ready call sheets, schedules and budgets, claimed a $10,000 Summer Venture Award. The firm is run by Nicholas Harty (ENG’27, W’27), Charles Hirschhorn (C’27, W’27) and Spencer Kaufman (C’26).

Chloropept

Developing Antimicrobials with AI

What if AI could unlock formulas for new antibiotics, helping stem the tide of resistance to existing therapies?

Chloropept, a venture focused on using AI to develop antibiotics for use in poultry and other species, won the $10,000 Jacobson Social Impact Prize. The startup is run by Pedram Bayat (ENG’27, GEng’28), Mustafo Mustafokulov (C’27, W’27) and Lisa Sun (C’27, ENG’27, GEng’27).

Additional finalists included:

Paulze

A Marketplace for Spare Agricultural Inputs

Inevitably, when large firms purchase agricultural chemicals, some wind up with too much inventory and others too little. To unlock the value of those extra agricultural inputs, which typically languish in warehouses until they expire, Paulze is creating an online, two-sided marketplace.

The team includes Meyer Eskin (Queens University), Matthew Fallon (ENG’26, W’26) and Neo Matsuyama (C’26).

Atelic

AI-Powered Travel Planning

One of the greatest challenges when traveling is logistics: the complex process of organizing transit, housing and entertainment into a single itinerary.

Fueled by AI, Atelic allows users to input destinations of choice, importing them from social media platforms like Instagram, and then generates itineraries to share with friends.

The startup was co-founded by Stanley Liu (ENG’25, GEng’26) and Angelina Ning (GEng’26).

Biryani Blitz

Biryani in a Vending Machine

What if you could purchase biryani from a vending machine?

That’s the value proposition of Biryani Blitz, co-founded by Sidhya Ganesh (W’28, GEng’28), whose first unit is being installed in the Student Union at the University of California, Berkeley.

To learn more about entrepreneurship at Penn Engineering, please visit the Engineering Entrepreneurship website. 

Alumni interested in participating as judges in future iterations of the Startup Challenge can sign up online, and contact Irina Yuen, Venture Lab’s Senior Director of Founder and Joiner Programs, at iyuen@wharton.upenn.edu with any questions.

All photos by Sylvia Zhang.