The 2018 Louis H. Stumberg Venture Competition ended in a night of surprises for two competing startups.
While Quick Sip Coffee, founded by Jacob Hurrell-Zitelman ’20, took home the event’s $25,000 grand prize, a last-minute infusion from an anonymous donor awarded an additional $10,000 for runner-up PATCH, a smart-tech pill bottle startup run by Gavin Buchanan ’19 and Andrew Aertker ’21.
Alongside Quick Sip and PATCH, the event saw a strong showing from fellow competitors MONA, an augmented reality app founded by Andrea Acevedo ’18, and Intersourcing, a startup that connects U.S. businesses to overseas manufacturing, run by Sean (Zekai) Pan ’19, Brett Rasic ’19 and Steven Oleksak ’17.
Quick Sip Coffee
Here’s a shot of energy: Trinity’s own cold-brew coffee bottler.
Hurrell-Zitelman described the founding of his startup, Quick Sip Coffee, as a “process of experimentation.” The company began in August 2017 and has retail partnerships with nine stores in San Antonio, including one on the Trinity campus.
“What our product is trying to do is not only give people the best coffee we can, but also educate them on what the best coffee is,” Hurrell-Zitelman says. “I was ignorant too, at one point, and I want to be that factor that facilitates people’s interest in specialty coffee. That’s where we (are) now. We’re past the point of just serving coffee; we’re at the point of helping people find out what good coffee is.”
PATCH
PATCH, as Buchanan puts it, “is basically where the PEZ dispenser meets the internet.”
Short for Pill-Administering Technology for Compliance Healthcare, PATCH is a smart pill bottle that tracks whether people have taken their medication as prescribed.
Buchanan, along with Aertker, says the team is “combining medicine with real-time data, and this could have a huge effect on patients across America,”
There is no shortage of companies that boast “smart pill bottles” that remind patients to take pills, but PATCH is one of the first to pitch a design that gives administering researchers and medical personnel direct, real-time data about whether patients are taking pills as prescribed, Aertker says.
While Buchanan and Aertker are still honing their prototype, the basic design for PATCH works as follows: Pills are packaged in cartridges that each transmit data via Bluetooth “low-energy” technology to cloud-based servers, which clinicians and other medical personnel can access directly.
This fusion of tech, engineering, and computing is just what the doctor ordered for Buchanan, a mathematical finance major from Decatur, Texas, and Aertker, a computer science major from Denver.
“At Trinity, whether you’re in computer science or finance, you have to constantly be in a mindset of, ‘How do I innovate? How can I solve a problem in a different way?” Aertker says. “And that’s the approach we took with PATCH.”
The Stumberg competition, now in its fourth year, has invested more than $215,000 in 23 student start-ups, which range from international Colombian tax firm Coldeclara to outdoor camping company Relax and Do Designs (RADD). The event will start its next preliminary round in spring 2019.
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