Brookline Resident Wins $5K At Cal Poly Student Startup Competition

BROOKLINE, MA – Brookline resident Logan Hughes won third place alongside other California Polytechnic State University students in a startup competition at the end of April.

Hughes and Jensen Jalufka, both business administration seniors with a focus on entrepreneurship, as well as engineering seniors Elisa Horta and Justice Radler, received the third place award for $5,000 for their business idea Spikeless, a wristband that tests whether a drink has been drugged.

“It felt so great to win,” Jalufka, an Austin, Texas, resident, told the Paso Robles Daily News. “We put in a lot of hard work, so it’s really awesome to be rewarded. It’s really a humbling experience to be able to put this money towards our company.”

The student startup team was one of four that split $35,000 at the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship’s (CIE) annual Innovation Quest (IQ) competition, where Cal Poly students pitch innovative business ideas to a panel of judges in the hopes of securing funding for their startups.

Fourteen finalists pitched their ideas at the competition, but biology senior McClain Kressman and Nico Galin, a computer science student at UC Berkeley, took home the first-place prize of $15,000 for their startup BioGlyph at the event held April 29.

The second-place prize of $10,000 went to Instaboard, a digital whiteboard that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to allow users to illustrate their ideas and collaborate with others. It was created by computer science senior David Chen, an international student from China; recent art and design graduate Alina Chiu of Mandeville, Louisiana; and Andy Zhou, a University of Rochester finance and applied mathematics student.