Dual Server Cooling, a team composed of master's students from the Brown University School of Engineering's Program in Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship (PRIME), won the student track of the Rhode Island Business Plan Competition. It is the sixth consecutive year a Brown University team has won the student track of the competition.
Dual Server Cooling is using licensed technology to develop a new approach to cooling data centers that is 40 times more efficient, with lower implementation cost, than current data center cooling technologies. The group, led by Ze Chen, includes Yiran Gao and Kangbei Jiang, all of whom are graduate students in the PRIME program. The team received $20,000 in cash and services valued at $19,250.
The two other finalists in the student track, both from Brown, were MedSynergies and Pronto. Each team received $7,000 in cash and services valued at $7,250.
MedSynergies proposes to use a low-cost, pre-screening test that uses biomarkers to detect the onset of lung cancer at its early and treatable stages. Team members include PRIME master's students Aditya Singh and Pratik Thakkar.
Pronto Solutions is a smartphone application for ordering and paying orders at full-service restaurants, allowing customers to order on impulse and pay when they are ready. The team was led by Jesse Hartheimer '14. In December, Hartheimer was one of the winners of the Elevator Pitch Contest, sponsored by the Rhode Island Business Plan Competition. The Pronto Solutions team developed their plan in Danny Warshay's highly regarded course, Engineering 1010: The Entrepreneurial Process: Innovation in Practice. Other team members included Peter Hix '14, Raghavendra Kamalesh '14, Juliette Weiss (RISD '15), and Michael Zamost '14.
A team from Brown University has won the competition for the past five years. Previous winners have included Azavy (2013), Overhead.fm (2012), PriWater, now Premama, (2011), Speramus (2010), and Runa (2009).
Established in 2000, the Rhode Island Business Plan Competition has been recognized as one of the top 40 business plan competitions in the country. To date, it has awarded more than $1.4 million in prizes to competitors developing companies across many industries.