Professor Saurabh Bagchi and Graduate Students Matthew Tan Creti and Vinai Sundaram enter start-up company in Rice Business Plan Competition
Two ECE graduate students, Matthew Tan Creti and Vinai Sundaram, and ECE faculty, Saurabh Bagchi, are taking the idea of their start-up company, SensorHound Innovations, to the Rice Business Plan Competition (RBPC), being held in Houston, TX April 11-13. RBPC is billed as the world's largest business plan competition and this is its 13th year. There are 42 teams in competition this year. The teams for this year's competition were chosen from nearly 400 entrants based on their executive summaries to compete in five categories: life sciences; information technology; energy and clean technology; green technology, social; and other. The teams will have 15 minutes to present business plans in the competition for a grand prize valued at more than $450,000 and the opportunity to ring the closing bell at NASDAQ OMX this fall. The total prize money being awarded at this year's competition is $1.2M.
SensorHound Innovations builds software and provides services that improve the reliability and reduce the operations cost of networked embedded systems, the enabling technology behind smart grids for utilities, energy-efficient buildings, high-precision agriculture, and manufacturing process control and automation. It was founded by Matt, Vinai, Saurabh, and Patrick Eugster, a faculty member in the Computer Science department at Purdue. SensorHound is competing in the Information Technology category.