Methodology and sources

The Stella Zhang naming gift

In January 2022, Stella Zhang (FEMBA '05) and her spouse John Shen announced a naming gift that retitled the competition. In March 2025, Zhang added a further $750,000 five-year commitment that pushed the prize pool past $150,000. The bridge from Zhang to the competition was Zarina Bahadur (Baby Box, MIE '20, 2020 Grand Prize), whose company joined Zhang's Long Beach Accelerator portfolio.

Sources: Merage 2022-01 naming announcement · Merage 2025-03 extension.

What this is

A public, citation-backed historical record of the UCI Paul Merage School of Business Stella Zhang New Venture Competition. It was originally the Merage Business Plan Competition. It was renamed in January 2022 after the Zhang and Shen naming gift and extended in March 2025.

The site indexes every edition from the 2009 launch through the 2026 Grand Finale. It includes team rosters, prize amounts, project descriptions, judging panels where preserved and verified post-competition outcomes.

Verification standard

Every entry on this site cites a public source. Acceptable primary sources, in rough order of preference:

1. Merage press releases. The official record of the competition.
2. UCI Samueli School of Engineering coverage.
3. UCI Beall Applied Innovation profiles (innovation.uci.edu).
4. UCI Beall and Butterworth competition results (bbcomp.tech.uci.edu).
5. The company's own current website.
6. Peer-reviewed publications, federal filings (FDA, SEC, SBIR) and patent records.
7. Major business press coverage (TechCrunch, OC Business Journal, Business Wire).

LinkedIn is accepted for confirming individual roles but is flagged in citations because direct fetches are blocked by anti-bot protections.

What this is not

• Not an official UCI page. This site is maintained independently and is not affiliated with UCI, the Paul Merage School of Business or the Beall Center.
• Not a complete record. Some pre-2017 editions are partial. Rosters and prizes have been recovered where indexed UCI sources preserve them. The 2010, 2011 and 2015 editions remain structural gaps.
• Not a ranking. Outcome categories like OPERATING and ACQUIRED describe the current public state of a team, not a quality judgement.

Outcome categories

• Operating. The company is currently active with a live web presence, recent funding or recent product activity.
• Acquired. The company was acquired (asset or equity). The acquirer is documented.
• Pivoted. The company changed direction substantially from the original NVC pitch. The current product differs.
• Shut down. The company has formally wound down. The site is parked or offline and no successor activity is visible.
• Dormant. The company has no recent public activity but has not formally announced shutdown.
• No public outcome. Researched, but no traceable post-competition footprint surfaced.

Source repository

This site is generated from a public companion repository where the underlying data (JSON) and narrative outcome write-ups live alongside the citation list for each claim:

github.com/StellaZhangUCI/History

For the in-site index of every source URL grouped by year and outcome, see the bibliography.

Cite this archive

If you reference this archive in a paper, post or talk, the following citation is suggested. The companion data repository carries the canonical versioned source.

UCI New Venture Competition Archive. A historical record of the Stella Zhang New Venture Competition (2009 to 2026). stellazhanguci.github.io. Data and source citations: github.com/StellaZhangUCI/History.

Contributing

Corrections, additional sources or fills for the 2010, 2011 and 2015 gaps are welcome. The expected workflow is a pull request to the data repository with a primary-source citation for any new claim.

CONTRIBUTING.md in the companion repo has the contribution standard.

Last updated

Data version: 2026-05-11. Outcome data version: 2026-05-12.