2024 Completed

2024 NVC

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Industrial Safety

Awards

Category	Place	Team	Prize	Project
Grand Prize	Winner	Sentinel Kyle Deck (Mechanical Engineering), Michael Ross (Aerospace / Mechanical Engineering), Cody He, Spike O'Carrol, Natan Ampudia (Business Administration), Kevin Wu	$20,000	A platform that uses AI to detect trucker drowsiness and distraction and keep drivers alert.
Runner-Up	Winner	NeoMold Christine Ly, Christine Nguyen, Frida Sandoval, Kathy Duong	$5,000	A customizable, 3D-printed ear mold that non-surgically corrects newborn outer ear deformities within 2 to 6 weeks of birth, with reduced complications and patient re-admittance rates.
Track Award (Business Products)	1st	Sentinel Kyle Deck, Michael Ross, Cody He, Spike O'Carrol, Natan Ampudia, Kevin Wu	$10,000	See Grand Prize Winner.
Track Award (Business Products)	2nd	BagIt	$5,000	Aims to simplify access to savings on products and services for students and consumers by centralizing relevant on-demand discounts in one place.
Track Award (Consumer Products)	1st	Flare	$10,000	A safety glove and mobile app combination that addresses the dangerous miscommunication gap between riders, walkers and cars by alerting others to the rider's presence using signals, lights, sounds and gestures.
Track Award (Consumer Products)	2nd	Lynne	$5,000	A seamless bundle between an app and wallet that empowers women to take control of their lives by taking control of their birth control in a functional, fashionable and affordable way.
Track Award (Consumer Services)	1st	Quiver	$10,000	An all-you-can-surf board subscription that empowers surfers who want to ride a wide variety of surfboards by offering infinite board selection at brick-and-mortar board libraries.
Track Award (Consumer Services)	2nd	Crafty Palate	$5,000	Connects buyers directly with passionate artisans selling their homemade goodies online, making it easier than ever to discover and support a community's finest local food.
Track Award (Life Sciences)	1st	Two Cube Dylan Riffle, Shushrruth Sai Srinivasan	$10,000	Autonomous bioinformatics platform offering fully-autonomous research agents that streamline single-cell RNA analysis pipelines, enabling automatic code generation, result interpretation, and hypothesis development.
Track Award (Life Sciences)	2nd	NeoMold Christine Ly, Christine Nguyen, Frida Sandoval, Kathy Duong	$5,000	See Runner-Up Winner.
Track Award (Social Enterprise)	1st	PZ Nanopure	$10,000	Piezoelectric nanopore membranes to enhance "Blue Energy" (osmotic power) efficiency.
Track Award (Social Enterprise)	2nd	DermaVision Ashley Im, Alejandra Reyes, Mitchell Frazeur, Hao Ngo	$5,000	A forensic imaging tool capable of detecting bruising across dark and light skin tones, while also providing quantitative estimations of the time of injury.

Primary source: Merage press release.

Judges

Plus representatives from the UCI ANTrepreneur Center and Beall Applied Innovation; the line between judge and coach overlaps in NVC documentation.

Post-competition outcomes

• Sentinel Operating Driver-monitoring AI dashcam; working MVP stage as of September 2024 per ANTrepreneur profile. An earlier draft of this archive inferred absorption by Spotter.ai's 'Sentinel' Fleet Safety Platform based on product-nam...
• NeoMold Operating neomold.uci.design site is up. No incorporation, funding, or FDA filing yet. Design-stage academic project. Separate established competitor TalexMedical (InfantEar) operates in the same space.
• Two Cube No public outcome Confirmed only as a 2024 NVC winner; no website, Crunchbase, or follow-on traceable. Also placed at Beall/Butterworth 2024.
• Quiver No public outcome Reclassified 2026-05-12 from OPERATING to NO_FOUND after brand-disambiguation: an earlier draft mapped the 2024 UCI NVC Quiver winner to thequiver.com (surfboard-rental marketplace, est. 2015, founded by Joe Wilson an...
• Crafty Palate No public outcome The team's earlier-cited Google Form signup is deleted (HTTP 410); no operating storefront found beyond the 2024 NVC placement.
• DermaVision Operating DermaVision Technologies' multispectral bruise-imaging tool ('Portable Bruise Spectroscopy Across All Skin Tones') competed in the 2024 BMES Medtronic Student Design Competition and placed 3rd in the Mechanical/Electr...
• BagIt No public outcome Platform revolutionizing student savings with on-demand discounts. No traceable post-competition activity.
• Flare No public outcome Smart safety glove for cyclists with LED indicators for signaling. No traceable post-competition activity (unrelated UK 'Flare Cycling' light project is different).
• Lynne No public outcome Discreet, cooling wallet designed for carrying birth control. No traceable post-competition activity.
• PZ Nanopure No public outcome Piezoelectric nanopore membranes to enhance Blue Energy (osmotic power) efficiency. No UCI page, LinkedIn company page, or Blum Center listing names co-founders.