For the past few months, Impact has been working along side the Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE) to organize Ontario’s Next Top Entrepreneur Pitch Competition. From a large applicant pool consisting of undergraduate and graduate students representing 14 different post-secondary instituitions, five finalists were chosen to present their business ideas at the Discovery 10 Conference.

Last week, these top five teams delivered their pitches to a panel of judges for a chance to be enrolled in OCE’s Centre for Commercialization of Research’s New Entrepreneur Program. The winning team was granted a non-recourse micro-loan of up to $18,000 ($6,000 per team member), access to advisory services, and given the opportunity to network with key mentors and private investors.

The competition was a great success! Congratulations to Avenir Medical for winning the title of Ontario’s Next Top Entrepreneur! The winning teams were as follows.

First Prize Winner: AVENIR MEDICAL

Armen Bakirtzian, Andre Hladio, Richard Fanson, Ara Hasserjian

The heart of Avenir Medical Inc. is PelvAssist (trademarked), an intra-operative guidance tool which aids orthopaedic surgeons in the proper placement of the acetabular prosthetic component during Total Hip Arthroplasty (THA).

Second Prize Winner: GLASS TELEPRESENCE

Teresa Thomas, Gabriel Tomescu, David Farr

Glass Telepresence is offering revolutionary telepresence communications technology that enables life-size, high-definition, face-to-face visual and spoken communication between remote locations.

Third Prize Winner: TALK MESH

Anton Lopyrev, Francis Ian Mendiola, Prabhdeep Gill, Artem Lopyrev

Talkmesh is a multi-platform, dedicated application for you and your closest friends to keep in touch.

In addition to the pitch competition, the Impact Team was able to use the tradeshow setup at the conference to network with industry partners and students from across the province. One of the other highlights of the conference was certainly the keynote by Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computers.

Great job to all members of the Impact Team that made it to the event: Christine Lu, Teresa Choo, Nikhita Singh, Scott Tolksdorf, Dave Hale, Judith Ma, Sarah Katyal, Vino Jeyapalan and Yong Lim. Congratulations team for a job well done!