UC3M takes 5 out of 6 awards in the Startup Programme 2020
5/18/20
The projects Flying Organs, InvestIA and Unigow, promoted by students from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), have been awarded five of the six prizes given in the national final of the Startup Programme 2020, an initiative of the Junior Achievement Foundation whose aim is to foment an entrepreneurial spirit within the university. In this year’s final, the eight projects chosen from over 80 in 20 universities throughout Spain, were presented online before a jury.
Flying Organs is a multi-transport network optimized by Artificial Intelligence for urgent delivery of health and medical packages, such as organs for transplants. The objective of this automated network is to reduce costs and improve delivery times. This solution would allow more ambulances to be available for other purposes and would free up health care personnel from some of their logistics work. This project, developed by María Castro Sánchez, UC3M Biomedical Engineering student, and Paula Castro Sánchez, UC3M Data Science and Engineering student, was awarded the Enterprise Challenge Prize and will represent Spain in the Junior Achievement Europe Enterprise Challenge, a European competition in which 20 European countries are set to face off on-line this June.
For its part, InvestIA Capital is a software investment tool developed by Alberto Huertas Ramírez and Miguel Bernal Moya, students in the UC3M bilingual Computer Science and Engineering program. This system’s objective is to assist patrimony, investment funds and SICAV managers, among others, in improving their annual performance. The technology developed for this software is based on Artificial Intelligence, and within this branch, the continuous and interconnected learning called Deep Learning. This project was awarded the PwC prize, endowed with 1,000 euros, and the Science Park of Madrid Prize, which offers six months’ free space in their facilities.
Unigow is a collaborative platform whose aim is to connect university students and baccalaureate students to help and assess the latter in their choice of degree studies and university. More than one thousand students have volunteered to help and another thousand have requested information. This project, promoted by Alejandro Cañada Hinojosa, a student from the UC3M Management and Technology degree program, has been awarded the Entrepreneurs Organization (EO) prize, which classifies if for the GSEA Madrid competition, and the Madrid Emprende prize, through which the Madrid municipal government offers it space in its business incubator.
UC3M, through its Programa de Aceleración e Incubación de Empresas (Business Startup and Incubation Program), has collaborated with the Junior Achievement Foundation in the interuniversity Startup Programme since 2009. The University participates in tutoring and training entrepreneurs through developing business plans that analyze the viability of the projects’ different business ideas.
