Georgia Institute of Technology

Business and Economic Development Campus and Community

Georgia Tech Hosts ACC InVenture Prize

Student entrepreneurs from the 15 universities in the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) will spend two days at Georgia Tech this week, pitching their inventions and startups before panels of judges.

The ACC InVenture Prize rewards students with $30,000 in cash prizes for innovations with the potential to solve societal problems.

The competition is an offshoot of Georgia Tech’s own InVenture Prize, which started in 2009.

CauteryGuard, the winner of this year’s Georgia Tech contest, will represent the Institute in the ACC competition. Four biomedical engineering students developed CauteryGuard, a safer medical device used to remove unwanted tissue and to stop bleeding.

Both InVenture competitions leverage the maker culture flourishing at college campuses across the country. The contests foster entrepreneurial confidence and encourage students to push their ideas further.

“The InVenture Prize at Georgia Tech continues to give our students exciting opportunities to flex their creative and entrepreneurial muscles through academic competition,” said Rafael L. Bras, Georgia Tech’s provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs and the K. Harrison Brown Family Chair. “The success and energy around the competition were the motivators for the ACC provosts to extend the format to the entire conference and increase the collaborative academic initiatives among the 15 schools. We look forward to hosting the ACC InVenture Prize again this year.”

The ACC InVenture Prize is sponsored by the ACC Academic Consortium, which supports academic initiatives among member universities.

During the two-day program, students will tour Atlanta incubators and accelerators and meet with entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.

While 15 teams enter the competition, only five will advance to the finale taking place Friday at 8pm in the Georgia Tech Ferst Center for the Arts.

The finale will be televised on Georgia Public Broadcasting and other PBS affiliates around the country. The finale can be watched online here.

Teams will be judged in four areas: entrepreneurship, business model, quality of the idea, and the probability of becoming a successful business.

First place wins $15,000, sponsored by United Technologies Research Center. The second-place team earns $10,000. A $5,000 People’s Choice Award goes to the fans’ favorite, which will be determined by online and text voting during the televised final round.

CauteryGuard enters the ACC InVenture Prize competition with $25,000 in winnings from the Institute’s competition. The team won first place and was named fans’ favorite.

The team redesigned an electrocautery device by adding a retractable tip. This change prevents the risk of burns many doctors and patients face from the device’s exposed tip. It also eliminates the chance of fires in operating rooms because an exposed tip could come into contact with flammable materials.

The team members are: Jack Corelli, Hunter Hatcher, Devin Li and Dev Mandavia.

“It’s incredible to represent Georgia Tech,” Mandavia said. “We are thankful for all the support we’ve received over the past year and a half of working on the device.”