Five startups founded by University of California alumni pitched at the third annual Global Corporate Venturing and Innovation Summit in California this year in front of more than 650 delegates

This year’s Global Corporate Venturing and Innovation Summit hosted a pitching contest that featured five startups founded by alumni of University of California – telemedicine and drug delivery company Pandia Health, peer-to-peer vehicle charging network EVMatch, medical device manufacturer Tergis Technologies, scientific research platform Hyperthesis and phone lens accessory producer Lume. Introduced by Christine Gulbranson, senior vice-president for innovation and entrepreneurship at University of California, and sponsored by innovation platform Future Planet Capital, the pitch event gave each startup the opportunity to talk through their offering before a jury of industry experts and more than 650 delegates who attended this year’s summit. First to take the stage was Jude Calvillo, co-founder of Hyperthesis and alumnus of UC Los Angeles. Calvillo noted that it currently takes researchers an average of 35 hours to compile a literature review and 20 hours to identify a research gap. To solve this major pain point for scientists, Hyperthesis has developed a platform that generates schematics of research papers based on metadata – extracted through natural language processing technology – enabling researchers to find relevant data through a visual interface and within a few clicks. Calvillo said the platform was a significantly faster proposal than Google Scholar, a search engine that indexes scholarly literature such as peer-reviewed journals, conference papers and dissertations. Above L-R: Christine Gulbranson, Heather Hochrein, Jude Calvillo Hyperthesis, which is seeking between $380,000 and $1m in equity funding, hopes to target universities and marketing consultancies as clients. The startup also hopes to drive international synergy and discovery, allowing, for example, an English-speaking researcher to find papers in Chinese and significantly expanding the amount of literature to which scholars have access. Heather Hochrein, co-founder of EVMatch and alumna of UC Berkeley, was similarly bullish about having a fundamental impact on her chosen market – electric car charging. Hochrein began by explaining “range anxiety” – drivers may not choose an electric vehicle because they might run out of energy without the ability to recharge. The solution, according to Hochrein, is a peer-to-peer charging network that allows drivers to find the nearest charging point provided by a private user. Alluding to Airbnb, the platform that allows home owners to rent out a room or an entire property, Hochrein noted that some providers on her platform had bought a charger specifically to generate passive income, even though they did not own an electric vehicle. The company was launched in California in April last year and had since…

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