2026 Harvard President's Innovation Challenge

What moves me? The idea that human potential is limitless and where you come from and who you know shouldn't determine what you can do. — What moves me is to help each and every patient struggling with obesity to live longer and healthier lives. — What moves me is solving Africa's teacher shortage by empowering local community talents so children can learn 20 times faster at a tenth of the cost. — What moves me is transforming one room schools in the most hardto-reach areas in Colombia. What moves me is helping patients level the playing field between the healthcare system and themselves so they can feel supported in the same way that I was. What moves me is proving that Africans can build their own systems. What moves me is creating a world where kids with cancer are not only supported physically but mentally. — What moves me is solving the health inequities that we see in black communities so black people can live long healthy lives. What moves me is to protect the most vulnerable from problems humanity already knows how to solve. — What moves me? — Good evening everyone and welcome to the 2026 Harvard President's Innovation Challenge Awards Ceremony. IT'S great to see so many of you joining us here in person in Clarman Hall and welcome to our online viewers tuning in from all over the world. I'm Alexandra Stevens, the director of communications here at the Harvard Innovation Labs and I'll be your host tonight. So, as you saw from the opening sequence, the theme for this year's challenge is what moves you. And as you can see on the screen behind me, we'll be exploring that theme visually through a partnership with Random Act Productions, a Bostonbased interactive media startup. So all the visuals you'll see tonight are designed to move with us, responding in real time to the energy and movement on this stage. And now, please help me welcome to the stage Jill Cravitz, the Bruce and Bridget Evans Executive Director of the Harvard Innovation Labs. Awesome. Amazing. Good evening everybody. WOOHOO. — Tonight we gather around a simple but powerful question. What moves you? What compels you to take an idea seriously enough to test it, to build it, to share it with the world? often at real personal risk. To put your reputation on the line, to trade certainty for ambiguity, to give up a steady job, a predictable path in pursuit of something that might not work but must be tried. Because becoming a founder isn't just about having a great idea. It's about choosing again and again to keep going. Another pitch, another investor meeting, another customer interview, more data, deciding to pivot, failing, and that takes courage. That question sits at the heart of everything we do at the Harvard Innovation Labs. We exist to help students and alumni turn ideas into impact and to support them, not just as founders, but as people navigating that journey. Today, we are supporting more students than ever before. In fact, more than 3,000 students from across all 13 Harvard schools participated in Harvard Innovation Labs programming this year. Woo! Whether someone is exploring a problem or scaling a venture, we provide the community, the guidance, and the resources to move them forward from insight to impact. And there's no better place to do this than right here in Massachusetts. We have one of the most dynamic innovation ecosystems in the world. a place where universities, startups, investors, social impact, and industry leaders are constantly pushing what's possible. Tonight's finalists are not just part of that ecosystem, but they are

strengthening it. You will see that clearly in the ventures that take the stage tonight. These teams are using AI in meaningful ways, not just as a buzzword, but as a tool to solve real problems. You'll hear from climate ventures tackling urgent global challenges and from founders building missiondriven and commercial solutions alike. This is the best of Harvard innovation and you are here to witness it. So before we begin, I want to give a big thanks to Ernesto Bertoelli and the Bertoelli Foundation for making this challenge possible through their generous support year after year and to the many judges, advisors, mentors who have guided our teams along the way. Thank you for sharing your expertise, your time, your patience, and your belief in our founders. Now, it is my distinct pleasure to introduce someone who has been a champion for innovation and entrepreneurship across Harvard. President Alan Garver. Welcome everyone to Clarman Hall for the 2026 President's Innovation Challenge. I love this event. Turning an idea into a pitch, a pitch into a contender, a contender into a finalist, and a finalist into a prize winner. The excitement is palpable. Congratulations to all of you. Your curiosity and drive moved you to action, and we are eager to see where your ambition leads. It is no wonder that this year's competition saw some of the most diverse student ventures in the program's history. Entrepreneurship at Harvard was once the province of the few. It now attracts and nurtures the many, drawing on outstanding talent from across the entire university. You're here from medicine, engineering, business, public policy, and the arts. Proof that great ventures draw from every corner. And you are among the nearly 3,000 students. 3,000 students representing every school who are members of the Harvard Innovation Labs. That's a recordbreaking number that I hope and expect we will keep breaking in the years to come. The desire to create a better product or a better service, better prospects and better futures is alive and well in our community. What moves you? It's more than the question that framed this year's competition. It's a way of approaching challenges. Take for example the work of Will Amed, member of the Harvard College class of 2012 and founder of Whoop. A varsity squash player, Will became interested in measuring the body, what it means to be fit, to peak on a given day, to crash on a given day. He wanted to understand what his body was trying to tell him. During his senior year, Will began developing his idea inside the Harvard Innovation Labs. Today, Whoop is a health technology leader valued at 10 billion. The company is based in Boston and its wearable device is trusted by elite athletes including Patrick Mahomes, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Arena Sabalanka. Will started where you are standing tonight at Harvard with a problem he cared about and the audacity to believe he could solve it. He faced what you have faced.

Skepticism, uncertainty, rejection. But he kept going, undeterred by what might stop him, emboldened by what moved him in the first place. Harvard is proud to be the place where you started moving and where you gained momentum. I want to thank Ernesto Bertoelli and the Bertoelli Foundation for supporting your efforts and the efforts of many other entrepreneurs. I also want to thank the members of the Harvard Innovation Labs team for working without fail to make the year a success and this evening unforgettable. Thank you. Congratulations again to our finalist teams. Let's get started. — Thank you so much, President Garber, for those that wonderful introduction. Okay, here's how the rest of the evening will work. The President's Innovation Challenge is divided into five tracks. Three for students and two for alumni and affiliates. To introduce each track, we'll play a short film that features alumni founders who were participants in a past president's innovation challenge. We'll hear what moved them to start their ventures, how the PIC played a critical role along their journey, and what they hope to accomplish next. These founder stories will show us that the PIC isn't just a moment in time. It's not just one splashy night in Clarman Hall. It's a catalyst for future impact. I also want to remind the audience that tonight is not a pitch competition. While you'll hear one minute pitches from each one of our 25 finalists here, each venture has gone through multiple rounds of external judging to get to this very stage. And then comes the fun part. We award over half a million dollars in one night to all of our winners. You ready? — Yes. Okay. Awesome. Excellent. Uh, welcome. Our first track up is Healthcare and Life Sciences. — GQ and other magazines have called it the sperm apocalypse. They've called it sperm count zero. — Training infertility often is targeted towards women, but one startup is working to change that. — There's a massive problem around male fertility and that is what since day one we have been trying to change at Legacy. — That hormone is that what you call sperm? — No. Sperm is something else. — Sperm is increasingly accepted as the sixth biomarker of your health. That is where we're really leaning in, helping men understand themselves, their fertility status, their health status, and hopefully encourage them to make the changes they need to make. The process of testing yourself, whether you're a woman or a man, is dehumanizing and awkward and stigmatized and uncomfortable. And that is really what inspired the idea behind starting a business. I think where I'm different than many entrepreneurs, probably in a bad way, is I sat on this idea for years. I wasn't brave enough to take the plunge. I went through my own experience at the fertility clinic. But in my case, what really took it home was seeing the research and seeing the statistics around the fact that sperm counts have declined 40, 50, 60% in the last 40 years. And then every year a man gets older, his sperm quality goes down. We would very simply not be who we are without the eyab, without the launch lab. We got to meet a lot of entrepreneurs. We built a community which is amazing because it is a lonely journey building a startup. They helped us build a sense of community and camaraderie amongst one another. But more than anything, people took me seriously when I said I was incubating my company at Harvard. I don't think we would have raised our seed round and I don't know that we would have made the kind of progress that we did in 8 years without Harvard and without the Harvard ILA. The only way to be an entrepreneur is by doing. By doing you learn by learning you iterate. By iterating you get better. I love what I do. The amount that you get to grow as an individual being a founder, I mean you are just living life at warp speed. We've had 50,000 patients. We've had 500 withdrawals. I mean, we are getting emails on the weekly from people who are using our services to have kids. So, we have something that works. And so, what is the next step? Well, we have one of the largest data sets in the country, if not the world, around sperm. We know sperm so well. We're launching a sperm age product which will allow someone to understand how old is their sperm relative to their biological age. What kind of insights can they get about

their health, their longevity, their mortality? We live in a society where we're having children later than ever. Fertility rates are lower than ever before. Birth You get to very tangibly see and feel the outcome of what it is that you're doing. I like knowing that we were a part of the solution. We helped men understand where they're at. We took the burden off of just the female partner and we helped couples be more proactive about what kind of families they want to have because I think that is part of being a better husband, partner, and father. And now, please welcome the finalists in the student healthcare and life sciences track. I was planning to give my usual pitch this evening, but along the way, something changed. Earlier this morning, I received some difficult news about a healthcare condition that I've been navigating for the past couple months. And unfortunately, this is something which I'm all too familiar with. At the age of four, I was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer that I would never expected to survive. I've been navigating healthc care for as long as I've known. And that's why we're building a rule health. A health is an agentic care navigation platform that enables patients to focus on healing instead of navigating. We partner with life sciences to drive patient engagement, recruitment and retention through our navigation product. And we also gather observational real patient experience data that regulators are pushing for. In the six months of operating, we've signed over $160,000 in annual reoccurring revenue. And just in the past week, we closed our $ 1. 5 million fund raise with participation from the American Cancer Society. I am on a mission to bridge the gap between industry and patients so patients like me will always have a voice at a table. Welcome to AU Health. Thank you. We are Bond Health. Our aim is to dramatically improve how patients are recruited for clinical trials. Today, this problem causes one in three trials to fail and cause pharma companies over$1 13 billion per year in delayed revenues in the US alone. Why? Because the traditional method of recruiting patients is painfully manual. We can do better. Our AI powered platform screens through electronic health records to identify patients that match the clinical trial criteria. Then with AI powered outreach and informed consent, we help get those patients across the finish line to actually enroll in a clinical trial. Today, we are the only platform that does the entire end-to-end patient recruitment workflow. And most importantly, we do that with 100% HIPPA compliance. Our results, two to three times faster patient recruitment with over 90% accuracy. With that, from trials to treatments, you could leave that bond to us. Thank you. Obesity is one of the largest public health challenges of our time. And while GLP-1 drugs have transformed care, many patients still struggle with side effects or don't see enough efficacy limiting their long-term benefits. Overture Therapeutics is developing better, healthier obesity medicines to deliver long-term care. We are not developing another GLP-1 drug. We are leveraging human genetics to identify promising biology that allows us to unlock new treatments for patients and protects people naturally from obesity. We've assembled a team of leading obesity researchers, drug development scientists. We've raised a preede financing from leading biotech investors, and we're progressing our lead program into the clinic by 2027. There is no one-sizefits-all solution to obesity and our work is not done until we help each and every patient live longer, healthier lives. Thank you. Adults don't lose their independence all at once. They lose it

one step, one stumble, and one tragic fall at a time. That's why at Soul One, we're building the first robotic sock and digital wellness platform to assist movement and ensure safety. Because right now, over 24 million adults over 65 suffer from lower limb mobility decline and falls, hospitalizing nearly 1 million every year, and tragically changing their lives forever. So, this problem is getting worse. We went out and spoke with over 100 people who need a device like this to move every day. And they all said the simple thing. We don't want to wear devices that are existing now. And we asked them why. It's because they're either painful, stigmatizing, or too bulky. So, we had to create something fundamentally different. Something people actually want to wear. This is the Taria sock. It physically assists movement and lifts your foot as you walk. And this is the universal node. The power and intelligence. It maps the ankle in 3D space while actually flagging decline and adjusting assistance as you age to compensate. And this is just the beginning. We launched in 2027. Join us in improving and changing the outcomes of human mobility. Thank you so much. As a cardiac surgery resident, I've always wished for those few extra minutes. In heart attacks, strokes, or surgical emergencies, they can mean saving a life or losing one. The saddest part is that those minutes often already exist. They're just buried inside outdated systems, pagers, text messages, switchboard operators, and broken communication across every hospital. I'm Dr. Jeremy Levit, founder and CEO of Stenoa, the operating system for mission critical care. We turn fragmented workflows into one closed loop response, activating every recipient, orchestrating every step, and tracking every second from first medical contact to disease modifying treatment. The result is faster care, fewer errors, and better outcomes. Stenoa is live in across 10 hospitals, has powered the life-saving care of over 5,000 patients, and is backed by peer-reviewed evidence. Every four and a half seconds, someone enters a hospital where minutes decide whether they live, die, or become permanently disabled. Our mission is to give those minutes back. One operating system for every minute that matters. Thank you so much finalists. It's now my pleasure to present our first award of the evening. The $25,000 award in the student healthc care and life sciences track goes to Jeremy Levit Stenoa. Excellent. Congrats, Jeremy. And now, the $75,000 award winner for the student healthcare and life sciences track is Russell Beckerman, Overture Therapeutics. Russell, how will winning this prize help you move your venture forward? — Thank you so much. This funding means so much to our company. This is going to help us move our science forward in the lab. — Awesome. And now, please welcome the finalists in the alumni and affiliates healthcare and life sciences track. First time that I met Alice, she was six years old. She suffered from 50 seizures a day. her clinician couldn't find where to operate. This is why we developed our platform. It's analyze its the neurodynamics and was able to identify the true drivers of her seizures enabling the clinicians to eliminate all of her seizures from 50 to zero. Like Alice, there are 1. 2 2 million people in the US suffering from drugresistant epilepsy and their only

hope is brain surgery. But half of the surgeries still fail to stop the seizures. We work with seven hospitals. We validate the algorithm. We submit an FDA and soon we are going live with clinical utilization. So Alice like my kids here they are the same age and this is why I built fine neuro because every child deserve healthy life. Thanks so much. — My name is Dr. Ricardo Armas cardiologist at MGH and co-founder of Monotare. A few years ago I met a patient who I'll call Mr. Jones. He had sleep apnnea and was started on a CPAP to help him breathe at night. After one uncomfortable night with the mask, he never used it again. Two years later, I met him at the hospital with a serious heart arhythmia due to years of untreated sleep apnnea. Mr. Jones is one of 500,000 Americans each year who quit CPAP in the first 90 days, putting them at higher risk of heart disease and early dementia. That's why we built Monet, the first FDA registered AI powered remote monitoring platform for sleep. We connect every major CPAT brand, streaming real-time data from the patients machine to the doctor's office so we can intervene early. We are bootstrapped, profitable, over 1 million in annual revenue, 7,000 patients nationwide, and expanding across chronic conditions with smart watches, blood pressure cuffs, and more. Our mission at Monetary is to catch disease early and to keep patients like Mr. Jones out of the hospital. Thank you. We're in rapid aging society with 1 billion people over 65 years old today. Millions of them are experiencing aging associated neurodeenerative diseases and cause an over two trillion dollar annual societal burden. Hi, I'm Demo Wam, co-founder and CEO of Newurna Therapeutics. We aim to treat brain aging with the next generation RNA therapeutics. At NERNA, we developed the next generation olucleide technology that co-targets nuclear and cytoplasmic RNA enabling us to target near 100% of human genome. At USerna, we have received encouraging tractions from the institutional VC, big pharmaceutical companies and government agencies. We aim to deliver a development candidate that is ready for human trial to treat Huntington disease by the end of 2027. If you share a vision of the society with a longer lifespan and better brain health, please support us. Thank you. Hi, I'm Shana Wang, co-founder and CEO of Petitionian Medicine. I lost my father at the age of 10 from gastric cancer. The treatment that my family thought would cure him did not work. And he is not alone. Many cancer patients drugs do not for many cancer patients the challenge is not um whether they find the right drug. It's if they get enough that drug into the tumor because less than 2% of injected drugs actually gets the tumor while the rest of it circulates through the body potentially damaging healthy tissue. At Patision, we are flipping that equation with Infopath, a drug delivery platform that turns tumors into drug um delivery hubs. And our platform enables treatment to infiltrate into tumor tissue and kill cancers from the inside out while sparing healthy tissues. This year we won the innovative concept award from the national cancer institute and our um drug is advancing towards the clinic within the next two years. We are pathision medicine and we are not just targeting tumors. We are turning tumors into drug delivery hubs. Hello, I'm Katarina, the founder and CEO of Promos Therapeutics. Most drugs for inflammatory diseases suppress the immune system to manage symptoms, but they don't fix the underlying problem. And this is why most

patients relapse. We're taking a completely different approach and we're restoring a natural signal that patients are missing. Using Cron's patient samples from a Harvard affiliated hospital, we discovered that a key regulator of immune balance is inactive. Not because it's broken, but because it's not being activated. So instead of shutting down the immune system, we are turning it back on but correctly. We have developed a first-in-class oral drug devel drug candidate that activates this pathway locally at the site of inflammation, sparing the rest of the body and decreasing the chance of developing side effects. In preclinical models of Crohn's disease, it addresses all major drivers of the disease. We are advancing this to patients and if it works we can change the way inflammatory diseases are treated. Thank you. Wow. Amazing ventures. Thank you all. And now it's my pleasure to announce the $25,000 award winner in the alumni and affiliates healthcare and life sciences track. That goes to Nome Ped. Find Nuro. Got some little fans in the audience. I love it. Uh, and now for our $75,000 award winner in the alumni and affiliates healthcare and life sciences track, it goes to Katarina Chhatsi, Promacost Therapeutics, Katerina, how will winning this prize help you improve even more lives. — We are going to do safety studies so that we can take our drug to patients as soon as possible. — Congratulations. — Congratulations to our healthcare and life sciences finalists and winners. Now, we're going to take a moment to celebrate one of the earliest stages in a founders's journey, the idea. Different from our other tracks, the ingenuity awards recognize student members from the Harvard Innovation Labs who have put forth a creative solution to a pressing problem, even if it's not yet a venture. This year, we asked our members a simple question. Does anyone know what it is? you you've been paying attention. What moves you? And the response was extraordinary. We received nearly 200 submissions. Each one a reflection of curiosity, creativity, and a drive to make a difference. And after personally reviewing all of those submissions, um I can tell you with confidence, our future is in really, really good hands. But an idea needs fuel in order to move forward. And so that's why each Ingenuity Award winner that you'll meet tonight is receiving $2500 to advance their idea towards impact. These are the four winning video submissions. As a dentist, I see the consequences of clenching and grinding every day. Worn enamel, fractured teeth, and chronic jaw pain, often in patients who have no idea it was happening. Brex affects about 1. 7 billion people worldwide, including 75 million people in the United States. Although nightguards protect teeth, their bulkiness creates compliance issues and treatment still relies heavily on symptoms rather than objective data. But what if we could not only protect teeth, but actually understand what is happening in real time? Introducing Biteby by bite, an AI powered customized night guard embedded with micro pressure sensors that continuously and quantitatively measure bite force, frequency, and duration as it happens. It identifies patterns, tracks progressions, and delivers personalized insight to both patients and clinicians through an app, enabling targeted interventions and better

outcomes. With Biteby Bite, there won't be any guesswork, just precise, actionable insights meant to safeguard your smile. Today, over 100,000 people in the US are waiting for organ transplants. One of the biggest barriers is vascularization because without internal channels, engineered tissue can't deliver oxygen and nutrients and it fails. Our project Cryopab approaches this problem using an unexpected material, ice. We built a bespoke 3D ice printer from scratch. Custom extrusion, a pelio system down to -45° and our own tool path logic, and we made it work. Now, here's why that matters. Ice can create precise internal channel geometries inside soft materials and then simply disappear. No toxic residue, no extraction, just the channels you need exactly where you need them. This opens up new ways to fabricate internal structures with long-term potential in tissue engineering where vascular networks remain one of the biggest unsolved challenges. Cryopab shifts fabrication from building permanent structures to designing what can disappear to make life possible. We are Cryopab. The earth provides everything we need, but we have a lot of needs from AI data centers to electric cars, AC units, hospitals, universities. And despite the many climate commitments made worldwide, we are on a trajectory towards disaster. There are over 1 million abandoned mines in the world, half of which are in the United States, leeching toxic chemicals into drinking water and harming human health. That's where Remine comes in. disrupting the energy industry by converting toxic abandoned mines into geothermal energy systems that power communities for generations. Next generation geothermal energy systems allow us to access areas that were previously too cold or too deep for traditional systems. Remine redesigns horizontal multi-staged enhanced geothermal systems to generate energy in the 17,000 legacy mines identified by the EPA with geothermal energy potential and plugging that energy directly into the grid. The best part is that the largest cost was foregone using governmental policies and banks of cash waiting to be used. Fossil fuels drive 90% of our emissions. But at Remine, we're proving that the minds we left behind are the key to a carbon-f free future. I grew up in a small village in Myama where my parents run a rural clinic. I saw patients die not because we didn't know how to treat them but because diialysis was out of reach. Paratonia diialysis is a simple life-saving therapy patients can do at home but it depends on a constant supply of steroialysis which is expensive imported and often unavailable in rural areas. — An estimated 3 million people die because they cannot access dialysis mostly in low resource settings where supply chains fail. We are building Vitaloop, a human power system that converts locally available water into dialysis solutions through a compact purification and mixing process. It is designed to operate without electricity, reduce dependence on imported supplies and significantly lower cost. — In settings where diialysis fluids is unavailable, Vita loop enables local ondemand production, bringing treatment closer to where patients live and making it more reliable and affordable. We are preparing to pilot this in rural clinics in Yamar — because the problem was never the medicine. — It was access and we've lived that reality. — How amazing are those ideas? I mean the ice printer like what? Okay. — Yeah. Uh please join me in welcoming our four ingenuity award winners to the stage. Mary Grace Defransia, bite by bite. Cidi Patil Cryofab Abigail Morgan Fizer Reine and Nangant Tarang Vitaloop. Congratulations, Ingenuity Award winners. And now for our open track. It — it started with a very simple question.

In an era moving towards self-driving cars and commercial space travel, why do we still accept shoes that just don't fit? So, both shoes and vehicles are mobility devices that blend engineering, structural art, and have to get you from point A to point B in a way where you feel and look cool. We've been socialized to tolerate so many things in our lives. And there are so many things that we use and touch and feel every day that weren't made for us, that weren't meant for us, that we just accept because we don't know that there's anything better. And so shoes are one of those things, but there's so many other things, too. And if I can help open people's eyes to the fact that it can be possible to change something that people may have taken for granted as just a terrible experience, even if it's really hard to do. It was like a light bulb had finally fully lit and it attracted people who really appreciate what makes unique. And what makes unique is not the fashion element. It's all the pieces that underpin it. Two out of every three people wear shoes that don't fit. And despite all that, the footwear industry still relies on outdated standard sizing. Our AI and manufacturing technologies transform three smartphone scans into a shoe made for your body, but for 90% less and in one 12th the time. I call myself the unlikely fashion founder because I was the least fashionable girl in New York City and people would ask me, "Mave, are you launching an orthopedic shoe brand? " And I looked at myself and I was like, I understand where your question is coming from. I realized that I was the manifestation of the brand before we became a brand, before we designed our first shoe, especially around the time when we were transitioning from software to footwear. The eyab was really important for Impic. It gave me access to this global network of advisors, mentors. The Harvard community of entrepreneurs, specifically the IAB, is such a lovely combination of different disciplines because the university is so large and the eyab welcomes people from all of the different schools. I thought that was really wonderful to be reminded of people doing hard things in other fields too versus a B2B SAS tech environment. I am where I am because other founders have really helped me get there. There's no one else who gets it like another founder. People can dance around startups. They can talk to people who run and lead startups. They could work inside a startup, right? And they might think they get it, but they do not. Only other founders who've actually been in that seat truly get it. And there are so many unspoken understandings that things just click and things just flow. And so I just try to pay it forward. When I see another legit founder and I think that I can be helpful, I try to be as helpful as possible because I know that a lot of other founders have been very generous in their time and their energy and their support with me. What moves me is this belief that when future generations look back, they'll have seen it as inevitable that products that we use every day actually understand us, that they're actually made for us. I really want to reach its full potential. And I think we're only a fraction of the way there. I'm willing to put in the work to actually solve something that can touch people's lives every day they step out their front doors. All right, please join me in welcoming the student finalists in the open track. — As a kid in a small town in India, the only careers I felt I had the option to take were engineering, law and medicine. I was really interested in being a lawyer. So at 17, I chose to be a lawyer. Turns out the work was nothing like what I'd expected. It took me six long years to transition out. But here's what I've realized since. I am not the exception. I'm the rule. Every year we spend $2. 1 billion on career guidance. Yet 72% of kids don't feel prepared and take blind bets on their careers. That's

why we created Explore Youu, a platform where students can test drive more than 100 careers in short immersive simulations by doing the work, making choices, and understanding the realities of that profession. We are on our way to reach 15 million kids this year by partnering with country's largest career readiness organizations. We wish to create a world where it's not about you being good enough for the job but the job you. Thank you. There are 2. 7 billion people whose job does not happen at a desk. I'm talking construction workers, manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, truck drivers. And all of these people have applied to jobs on phones through systems built for the white collar worker. I'm talking long web flow applications, communication restricted to emails between recruiters and candidates. I mean, give me a break. That's exhausting and it's not working. 85% of deskless candidates that start these applications don't finish. So, what if applying to a job was as easy as sending a text message? So, we built Fast Flow recruitment inside the app candidates already use. I'm talking iMessage, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, SMS. Apply, schedule an interview, and get hired all in a single chat. In just 6 months, we're already working with Porsche, Volkswagen, McDonald's, and the industry leader is losing clients because they're coming over to us. Fast flow will be the default infrastructure in which the next 2. 7 billion people apply to their next job. The recruitment of the future is in our hands. Thank you. — Hello. In 2010, two of the world's most respected economies published a paper. It became a pillar for the case for financial austerity across Europe. Three years later, a graduate student found an error in their spreadsheet that invalidated the headline result. By then, the policies that were based on that paper had already cost millions their jobs, especially across southern Europe where I'm from. Peer review is supposed to be the gold standard for qualitative assurance. Sorry, quality assurance rather. But it's not built to catch errors like this. I've been a part of that process and almost no reviewer engages obsessively with papers line by line, claim by claim. At refine, we package and sell obsession. Our AI powered reports are used by Nobel laureates in the biggest central banks in the world by researchers in the leading policy institutions and globally in every single top university in the United States. After more than 10,000 reports and $1. 7 million annual run rate revenue, we have set out to become the universal certification layer for technical work. Thank you so much. Hundreds of millions of smallh holder livestock farmers across emerging economies have been pushed out from accessing basic animal feed due to broken supply chains and import dependencies. The results are multi-layered. Low livestock productivity, squeezed farmer income, but more importantly, nutritious livestock products such as eggs and poultry meat become unaffordable to the mass population, driving malnutrition and stunting. At Revolve, we're solving this broken supply chain in a way that's both commercially profitable and structurally scalable. We convert abundantly available organic waste into affordable animal feed, leveraging a natural bio conversion process. This enables us to cut input costs significantly and boost livestock productivity directly impacting farmer economics. We're two founders at Harvard and Stanford actively working on scaling this solution across high growth emerging economies where the demand for food is rapidly outpacing the supply. Thank you. Every major power on earth protect its data. The US has the cloud act. The EU has the GDPR error. And China has its

data rules. Africa has been the exception not because it doesn't deserve sovereignty, but because no one built the infrastructure to make it possible until now. Sona is the sovereign AI company for governments. We give central banks and regulators realtime visibility into their economies without surrounding their data to foreign jurisdictions. Today we are live inside the central bank of Liberia. The first national infrastructure deployment in West Africa powering realtime intelligence and macroeconomic forecasting. Before Sona detecting foreign exchange shocks took six weeks after sorna is only 30 minutes. This is how economists move from reacting to leading. We are sa the future of African intelligence. Thank you. Amazing work finalists. Thank you. So before announcing the winners, um I just have to call attention to Jill's shoes. Um did you notice that she's sporting ambics? That's We love a shameless plug in support of our founders. Um, okay. Uh, and now without further ado, the $25,000 award winner in the student open track is Briu Demilu Revolve. Congratulations Congratulations. And now for the $75,000 winner in the open student track, it goes to Yan Calvo Lopez, Refined Technologies. So tell us, how will winning this prize help you go further faster? — It will help us build one of the best applied AI teams in the world. We're hiring. Talk to me later. Thank you. — Congratulations. And now for our alumni and affiliates open track. So the finalists in this track are alumni founders in our global launch lab x accelerator program. Uh unfortunately one of our Indiabased finalists had their flight cancelled last minute so we'll be showing a video pitch instead. Now please join me in welcoming the finalists in the alumni and affiliates open track. — Hi. When I started my career as a young lawyer in India, I was idealistic and I thought I would fight for justice. But then I got to the courtrooms and I spent more time trying to find the right document instead of cross-examining witnesses and candiding cases correctly than getting my client's justice. And that's when I realized that in the global south, justice is not just a question of law, but it's a question of logistics. It's a coordination problem. And so I co-founded Adalat AI, a legal tech nonprofit organization that's building AI and technology solutions specifically for the needs of courtrooms and expediting those clerical and manual processes that slow the courts down. We build AI powered courtroom transcription, case flow management systems, paperless filing systems, WhatsApp chatbots for citizens to actually track their cases in the system. And so in a sense, we're the plumbers of the courtroom fixing the plumbing of the courts and unclogging the pipes of all the manual and clerical paperbased processes that bo the courts down. And we're already in 10 states covering 5,000 court homes, which is almost 20% of India's judiciary. And thanks to our shared colonial legacy, we're also expanding to Africa and other common law countries across the global south. And so the next frontier we want to expand to all the courts in India in the next 5 years and multiple countries in the global south to provide timely justice for all so that pro the process is no longer the punishment. Thank you. Good evening everyone. Whether you walked here, drove here or took the tea, you all use the built environment to get here. In fact, we all use the built environment every day. We just don't really think about it. And we should because the built environment is failing us. We're in the middle of a housing availability and affordability crisis. All kinds of energy prices are

as expensive as they've ever been. And you just have to go outside to see the state of roads and public infrastructure. Now, there's a reason for this. Construction projects are getting bigger, more complicated, more expensive. There's a massive labor shortage. Essentially, construction is risky. And I know cuz I was a GC for a decade. It's a 12 trillion global market that needs a paradigm shift. ENL is that paradigm shift. We're an AI native riskmanagement company for built world projects. We work with all the stakeholders of a project, the builder and the owner of course, but also designers and architects and insurance and lenders to understand the scope and the risk of new deals, compare them to past projects and what's been done previously. run scenarios automatically so that you have a sense of what's going to happen if it goes wrong, which often happens, and then stick to that in the execution and construction phase after you sign. We're venturebacked. We're deployed on over 17 billion dollars worth of construction project value in North America and Europe. But most importantly, we've given back thousands of hours to real people on real projects by changing what used to be 3-w weekek manual processes and workflows to less than 15 minutes with AI powered workflows. Enlay is on a mission to help the built world build beyond risk. Help us bring construction into the 21st century. Thank you very much. Hi everyone, my name is Marcus. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Field Data. I grew up hurting cattle in my grandmother's ranch in Argentina. And in those countless hours spent on horseback, I was always obsessed with one question, which is how do we help agriculture be both more profitable but sustainable as well. Today, I believe the answer to this question is form digitalization. But agriculture has a unique challenge, which is that a cowboy doesn't want to come home at the end of a long day on horseback to put data into a spreadsheet. They're just not going to do it. That's why at field data, we developed an AI agent that allows anyone to enter agricultural data with their voice. So they can say, we move 20 cows from field one to field 7. And our AI agent automatically structures that information. And then it makes that information available to the form manager and owner to make better decisions about their crops, their livestock, and their finances. And it's working, which is really exciting. Uh last month alone, over 2,500 farmers entered over 65,000 data points into field data. We're seeing how AI is finally allowing us to digitize agriculture to make the whole sector both more profitable and environmentally friendly. Thank you. Hi, my name is Tanya and I'm the co-founder of Maka Kids. Together with my co-founder Isabelle, we've spent over a decade building tech, sharing stories with 15 million families. Recently, we kept hearing the same thing from parents. They they've lost trust in kids media. Most parents are not anti-screen. They're overwhelmed. They don't have time to sift through the mess of endless toy unboxings, hyper stimulating cartoons, and AI slop. And there's growing concern about what this content is doing to little minds. So, we built Macka Kids, a streaming app where every show is built around how kids grow. On MKA, kids find shows that they already love in expert design channels that help to model healthy relationships and help kids to wind down with low STEM stories. There's no ads, no addictive algorithms, and when time's up, Macka characters help kids to transition offscreen without the fight. MKA Kids is powered by imprint, a framework we developed with researchers at Yale Child Study Center. It's the first technology that enables us to measure the developmental health of kids media at scale. So families finally have a quality score they can trust. Thousands of families have already signed up for Macka Kids. Together we're rebuilding the digital world our kids deserve. Thank you. There is a $500 billion capital gap facing the 36 billion under I'm sorry, the 36 million underbanked small businesses across the US today. And it's not because the funding is not out there. It's because it's painstakingly

difficult for them to access that funding. So from restaurants to child care centers and beyond, small businesses are spending five plus hours a week searching and applying across fragmented systems only to get rejected and often without any explanation at all. My name is Andrew Leon Hannah. I've dedicated my life to this topic inspired by my family's immigrant small business story. Uh and I've uh I'm a professor at Chicago Booth focused on the topic and I wrote a Financial Times best book of the year about small businesses. Mona is the only company that uses AI to continuously find and secure best fit loans, grants, government funding, and incentives for small businesses with one single application. We've served over 5,000 small businesses across 100 plus cities in the US and delivered millions in affordable capital to help businesses grow. And we're backed by the Mastercard USA Innovation Fund. Small businesses are genuinely the heart of our communities and our back the backbone of our neighborhoods. And I truly am so proud to work side by side with them. They're heroes in our communities and we all know this. They deserve to be brought in on the advancements that AI is seeing right now and it's our mission to ensure that they are and that they get the resources that they deserve to scale and to light up our communities more. Thank you. Wonderful pitches. Thank you. Okay, it's now my pleasure to announce the $25,000 winner in the alumni and affiliates open track. It goes to Phipe Reval and Lelay Congrats, Phipe. And now for our $75,000 award winner in the alumni and affiliates open track. It goes to Utkar Saxa Adalat AI. Thanks so much and uh I'm so sad to miss this and not be there in person. Uh and thrilled to uh be getting this capital so that we can take this work from India to other parts of the global south where codes are blackloed and timely justice is not a reality today. — Thank you. Congratulations. When I was 12 years old, uh, my dad tried to marry me off and my mother finally broke the cycle of child marriage for me. My mother was a victim of a child marriage. She was pulled out of school and was married off to my dad at 16 years old. She never was able to collect the fruits of her labor. So somehow we still lived in poverty and pests and electricity going out. Every weekend when my mom would take me to work with her, we would go on this super long train ride from Queens and I was just so excited because I would just be able to spend time with my mom. I just remember going in there and playing with all the different fabrics. I would be in a giant cardboard box filled with buttons just like the entire time seeing my mom negotiate and communicate with customers and do sales. after she was already a child bride, after she's already had two kids. My thought was, what if we just brought all of those skill sets to the girls beforehand, before they became child brides, before their lives were basically sacrificed against their will. The Mysoli Foundation has this incredible curriculum where we teach young girls financial literacy, leadership, confidence. We have now prevented over 500 child marriages. When I was starting this, I was really depressed, having been in poverty and then being in college with all of these really educated and smart people and just feeling like I wasn't good enough. I remembered the cousins that I still have in Bangladesh that are still being married off as child brides. And even though what I was going through was so hard that I still had so much agency and so much choice to live my life the way that I want. That really started to move me that like there are so many girls that don't get those choices and don't get those options and that agency. what I do and I want to be able to use it to my full extent.

One of the biggest reasons why I came to Harvard was the innovation lab because as an entrepreneur and as a founder to have the network and resources and the incredible advisors and the different kinds of opportunities for not just funding but just visibility. They help you refine your pitches, your materials, your mission, the way that you speak about everything that you do in a way that's concise and easy to understand. They really help you get to the next level and I'm very grateful. If we even just save one girl, her entire lineage has now been saved. Everything about this can be scaled to not just hundreds of girls but thousands of girls. And entire generations of child marriage can now be broken because of what we do. Oh, that is such an incredible story. Um, and thank you Arya for sharing it. She's here with us tonight. — As you may have guessed, we've reached the final track of the evening, our social impact track. So, please welcome the amazing student innovators in the social impact track. — Good evening. I'm Matthew and I'm from Atlanta, Georgia. I grew up in a community in a predominantly black community where the life expectancy was 20 years lower than white neighborhoods really close by. This is the unfortunate truth in many cities across our country, where black communities don't have access to the resources, information, and care that would enable them to live healthy, long lives. Black health exists because the pathway to better health for many black communities is broken. And we're repairing that pathway by meeting people where they are, connecting them to care, and helping them with the tools and information that enables them to shift systems that lead to better health. And I've seen what happens when this path works. Kathy was a community organizer who was a few years late on her colctal cancer screening. She attended one of our events and was screened. Subsequently tested positive for colon cancer, but was able to connect with a prof with a physician who attended our event as well and was able to get into care and have her cancer removed. This is she's one of more than 20,000 people that we've screened for colorectal cancer. And this is what it looks like when engagement leads to timely care. Black Health is building a future where black communities can live longer, live healthy lives, and where they have the power to shape health systems. Thank you. When I was in middle school, I lost the two most important people in the world to me in the span of two months. But I'd missed the grief in those hospital rooms. I realized something that nobody talks about. Cancer steals childhoods. I want you guys to imagine what it would feel like if you were confined to a hospital room for months and had to miss your birthday, the start of the school year, and your friends. Kids with cancer lose a sense of normaly and their ability to develop socially. Young people are actually uniquely positioned to address this gap by providing friendship and connection. So, at just 14 years old, I started Cancer Kids First. Today, in just six years, we have become the world's largest youthled cancer nonprofit, uniting 43,000 volunteers around the world to help 15,000 pediatric cancer patients. And our programs work. In fact, 99% of our patients reported improved well-being by connecting with other kids through our programs. But our demand is growing faster than we can meet it and we need your help to continue scaling globally. Cancer treatment may save lives, but at Cancer Kids First, we believe it is a community that makes those lives worth living. Thank you. Do you know what a one room school in the most remote mountains in Colombia looks like? It all happens in one classroom.

Yes, one classroom, one teacher, all subjects, students from 4 to 12 years old sitting together. But guess what? This not only happens in Colombia. 30% of learners worldwide study in multi-grade classrooms. Half of them graduate fifth grade unable to read or do simple math. These classrooms are invisible to the educational system. Teachers lack resources and they have no time for planning everything. I was one of those teachers. I live this reality and I'm here to change this. This is why Colombando created a teaching model designed specifically for one room school teachers. In less than six months, half of the students are now learning at grade level. We turn classrooms from road learning to classrooms full of movement, teamwork, and academic achievement. I am Valeria and this is Colombo. Meet Ami. She's a 10-year-old growing up in Mali. Right now, she's sitting inside a classroom with 80 other kids because there are not enough teachers. She's learning fraction in French, a language that no one speaks at home, using pizza as an example, a food that she has never seen. See, Ammy is not failing because she's not smart enough. She's failing because the system was not designed for her. At Nerd, we train trusted community members and we empower them with our own localized AI tutor. Ammy learns in her native tongue with local example and a high touch support. Students have gone through our program have jumped one full grade level in reading in just eight weeks. My name is Muhammad Kante. I grew up in Mali just like Ammy and she deserve the same shot that I got. This is In rural Liberia, a little girl named Fatu is rushed to the nearest hospital for emergency surgery. Halfway through the procedure, the electric grid collapsed. Complete darkness. The doctors pull out their phone flashlights and complete the procedure. Fatu survives, but she needs oxygen and medication kept cold. Her parents pay for fuel to keep the hospital's generator running overnight. But there's a miscalculation. The fuel runs out. The generator stops. The oxygen dies. And so does she. 10 years old. This is a reality for 11 patients every hour. Not because doctors lack skill or because medicine is unavailable, but because the infrastructure fails them. So we built Winko Solar. We combined solar power, oxygen, and coal chain into a single system engineered to keep healthcare running when everything else fails. We're executing across six countries. And our track record is zero downtime in over a year. And we'll keep deploying so no hospital goes dark and no children need to die from problems humanity already knows how to solve. Zero downtime. Critical care everywhere. Thank you. Absolutely incredible. Thank you for doing this important work. Wow. Okay. The $25,000 award winner in the student social impact track. Let's get loud for her. Valeria Colombiano. Ah, I love it. Okay.

And now for our final award of the evening. The $75,000 award in the student social impact track goes to Akona Mubagwa Winko Solar. So tell us, how will winning this prize help you accelerate your impact? — Well, we got a lot of work to do. It will help us standardize our deployment so we can deploy faster. I want to thank Rebecca Emanuel and Dr. John Samson. Thank you. — Congratulations. — AWESOME. What a night. And I need a cheering section like Valyria's. Like where can I find you all after the show? Congratulations to all of our winners. finalists. You are truly building our future and we are so grateful. Uh over the past hour, we've heard bold ideas, powerful pitches from founders who are not just imagining what's next, but actively creating it. If you want to be on this stage next year, we have two opportunities for you to do so. We're now accepting applications for two eyab accelerators. The first is our alumni launch lab x accelerator for alumni startups and the other is our climate entrepreneurs circle for sustainability ventures. So please, please, if you're building something incredible like all of these finalists are here tonight, please apply by May 12th. information can be found in the event program. Tonight's ventures truly remind us what it looks like when what moves you becomes what you move forward. But as exciting as this moment is, it's not the finish line. It's actually just one step in a much longer journey for you all. One that opens doors to new visibility, new partnerships, new opportunities. And that's where all of you come in. If you heard something tonight that moved you, don't let the moment pass. Reach out, make an introduction, offer your perspective, open a door, because the strength of this ecosystem comes from what we do for one another. For those of you here in person, I invite you all to join me back at the Harvard Innovation Labs for an afterparty so that you can meet up with one another and our amazing finalists. Thank you to everyone who made tonight possible from the Bertoelli Foundation, President Garber, the Harvard Innovation Labs team, and everyone here tonight. Please stick around for just a few more moments to hear some special messages, especially for our founders. Thank you and good night. — Hey Sean, congratulations. Congratulations on being chosen as the finalist in the president's innovation challenge. Your perseverance, dedication, and hard work inspire everyone who has the privilege of knowing you. You are turning your dreams into reality and watching you grow into the incredible young man you are today is the greatest reward of our lives. — Continue to dream big and always remember that we are your biggest cheerleaders. We are so very proud of you and we wish you every success in all that you pursue. We love you. — Yo, Philip, it's your co-founder Stamati here. We've poured everything into building Annlay together and man, I'm so excited for you to go show it off to the world. Congrats. — I'm so proud of you. I love that the world gets to see what you're building, which is a beautiful reflection of who you are as a leader, of your roots, and where you come from, and of the future that you're trying to build for generations to come. and I'm so lucky that I get to be part of this journey with you. Congratulations, Jeremy, for making it this far. Keep on making a difference and reaching for the stars. We are so proud of you and we love you very much. Congratulations, Soul One, on making it to the President's Innovation Challenge finals. I am super proud of you guys. Congratulations, Victor. And a very special congratulations to my wonderful husband, Bradley. I see the effort that you put in, the allnighters that you've put in, your passion as well as your purpose to make people's lives better to give them hope and I am so in awe of you damn proud of you. Odin loves you and I love you so much. — Hey Vene, it's Michael Horn here. I'm so proud of you for finding your own fit and helping others find their fit as well. It's just amazing to watch uh the career exploration tool that you have built. Good luck in the challenge. Go

get them. This is something that the world needs and a lot of students are going to benefit. — Congratulations on being a President's Innovation Challenge finalist. Woohoo. Um I am so proud of you as always and uh I've been very privileged and honored to have seen you grow your company for the past year and a half. Um, I know that sometimes things can get rough, but uh, your perseverance and hard work never ever goes unseen. So, I can't wait to see the impact that you make on honors through the success of your company. Congrats. — Hello, Shauna and David of Pastision. Congratulations on making it to the finals. It's been really a privilege for me to watch you progress from the beginning and see uh how far you've come and how innovative you are about uh being capital efficient and really making progress. So, hope you have a great event. Congratulations, Jeremy, for making it to the finals. Watching you build Stenoa all while being a cardiac surgery resident has been so inspiring. You deserve every bit of this recognition and I am so proud of you. Keep on shining. — Hey Russell, congratulations again. Look, we've moved fast. We've taken our programs a long way. And the fact that we've done so with such a lean team really speaks volume for you as a leader. And look, I've said this many times. Your decisiveness, your sense of urgency, and your ability to execute are just unmatched. And anyone who knows you understands that you do not shy away from any of these big moments. I'm proud to be your business partner. I'm excited for what we're building and ultimately what this is going to mean for patients. Congratulations, Muhammad. Last year, you sat in this very audience and affirm that being on the pick stage was part of nerd's journey. Now, I'm watching you embody this truth. I am so proud of you, my friend. Your future and I nerd's future looks very bright. Again, congratulations Follow gas.