A historical archive
A public, citation-backed record of seventeen editions of UCI's flagship student venture competition. Teams, prizes and what became of them.
This site indexes every Grand Prize, track award and specialty award disclosed in primary UCI Merage and UCI Samueli sources from 2009 onward. Every team has a per-year entry. Every post-competition outcome is anchored to a public source.
The record begins with the 2009 launch under the Paul Merage School of Business. It then follows the competition through the move to standard $10K and $5K track payouts in 2018. After that comes the January 2022 naming gift from Stella Zhang (FEMBA '05) and her spouse John Shen. Then the March 2025 $750,000 extension that pushed the prize pool past $150K.
A handful of teams have produced traceable post-competition trajectories. Each one is anchored to public filings, press coverage or a company announcement.
Rebranded after the competition and now based in Carrollton, TX. The Brava hidden-braces system launched commercially in June 2022. A $19.5M Series B led by View Ventures closed in May 2025. PitchBook reports roughly $46.2M in total funding to date.
Acquired by Medtronic in April 2020. The FlowMet continuous optical perfusion monitor was folded into Medtronic's peripheral-vascular portfolio. It is the cleanest exit documented in the archive.
Founded by Zarina Bahadur (MIE '20). Raised a $1.2M oversubscribed pre-seed in 2023 with XRC Labs, Sunstone, Salt Lake City Angels and California Crescent. Total raised has now grown past $1.3M. Revenue tripled in 2022 and the founder cites a roughly 14% monthly growth rate per OCBJ.
Rebranded after the competition as a managed virtual-assistant service. Raised a $2.1M seed in October 2021 and continues to operate in 2025 and 2026 per UCI Beall Innovation coverage.
The subscription was absorbed into Moongoat Coffee Roasters' own programme in December 2022. The terms were not disclosed but it was an asset and subscriber transfer rather than an equity deal. It is the third documented exit in the archive.
Founder Leila Safavi received $223K+ in NIH SBIR funding in 2019 per UCI Beall coverage. She was also named to Oak Ridge National Lab's Innovation Crossroads Cohort 3. Still operating in radiopharmaceutical isotope work as of last verification.
Disclosed cash prizes only. In-kind awards like AWS credits or residency placements are excluded.
2014 and 2015 are not shown (no disclosed totals in indexed sources). See the analytics page for the full table.
Each year page lists the full awards table, the team rosters as preserved in the primary press release and a set of post-competition outcomes. The team directory cross-references every team alphabetically with an outcome badge.
Every claim on this site is anchored to a primary public source. That includes Merage press releases, UCI Samueli coverage, company sites, federal filings and peer-reviewed papers. See methodology for the verification standard.