At the end of the spring 2016 semester, the Peter T. Paul Entrepreneurship Center (ECenter), along with a team of academic and industry judges, selected two teams to be awarded the 2016 Summer Seed Grant. Thanks to the generosity of the Wildcatalysts Network, Kennebunk Savings, and Raka Creative, the ECenter awarded $10,500 to four people (two teams) to work on their early-stage ideas or startups over the summer, instead of having to find summer jobs.
The teams selected for the grant were Project OASIS and RAIDX. Project OASIS team members Siddharth (Sid) Nigam (’16), Paige Balcom (’16), and Ethan Pirie (’17), all mechanical engineering students, developed energy efficient, small-scale aquaponic systems that have the potential to grow food in any geographical location, year-round, in any climate, with zero chemicals, and 90% less water than conventional agriculture. RAIDX, started by Ph.D. student András Fekete, is the development of an expandable storage device for home and business use that automatically manages redundancy of data, so that a single hardware failure does not cause loss of data.
Over the course of the summer, the teams worked with mentors Mark Kaplan, Joshua Cyr, and Joseph Ferraro of Alpha Loft and John Kealey of Decision Lens to develop their ideas and business plans. The teams presented the results of all their hard work on August 11th at the ECenter. Video clips of the final representations can be found on the ECenter’s YouTube page.
Heather MacNeill
Program Manager, ECenter
