The Final Round of the Lowell Milken Institute-Sandler Prize for New Entrepreneurs was a public competition in which the final six teams, BellaNove, ClearVision Tech, Efsevin, Mote, Riders Share, and Vanth each had 25 minutes to present their venture and answer questions from the judges. For the 2017-18 competition, there was a First Place Prize of $70,000, a Second Place Prize of $30,000, and an Audience Favorite Award of $1,000. Team Mote, a fleet vehicle carbon capture company, was chosen as the recipient of the First Place Prize. The Second Place Prize went to Team BellaNové, a membership-based maternity-wear rental service, and the Audience Favorite Award went to Team Vanth, a social impact platform that connects consumers directly to seamstresses. You can learn about all of the finalist teams below.

Missed the event? Check out the event program.

This event was sponsored by Lowell Milken Institute for Business Law and Policy, UCLA School of Law and Stradling Yocca Carlson & Rauth.

Pictures from the 2018 Final Round of the Competition:

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Finalist Teams

1. BellaNové (Second Place Winner) - BellaNové is a membership-based maternity-wear rental service offering its customers the flexibility they need in a pregnancy wardrobe and the efficiency they need in the shopping experience. Rather than settling for nine months in the same pair of elastic-waist pants or dishing out several hundred dollars for a few nicer items she would probably be able to wear no more than a few times before outgrowing them, BellaNové gives the expecting working woman a revolving wardrobe that adjusts in size, comfort, and work-appropriateness. With proprietary truefit technology, BellaNové will leverage machine learning to predict individual customer preference for style, fabric composition, and more, matching each woman with the designs that will have her and her baby bump looking and feeling their absolute best.
2. ClearVision Tech - ClearVision Tech Inc. designs and manufactures ultra-flexible and lightweight Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) Radio Frequency (RF) coils that can be worn as a casual piece of clothing. RF coils are used to receive signals emanating from the human body, serving as the eyes of the MRI. In the current MRI facilities, rigid and bulky materials are used. As a result, the patients are not comfortable when having MRI especially when the imaging area has high curvatures such as head, neck, and extremities.  ClearVision Tech Inc. solves the problems by utilizing ultra-flexible and lightweight material and increasing the image quality by one order of magnitude.  The increase in image quality also means a reduced imaging time for images of the same quality.
3. Efsevin - Efsevin (“F-7”) is a first-in-class drug candidate poised to safely and effectively treat irregular heart rhythms, filling the greatest unmet need in the multi-billion dollar heart disease market. The two most common forms of irregular heart rhythms, also called arrhythmias, are atrial fibrillation (AFib) and ventricular arrhythmia (VA), that together affect over 55 million people worldwide. Efsevin, corrects arrhythmia by a completely novel and superior mechanism. Rather than blocking the major ion channels as existing drugs do, Efsevin restores normal heartbeat by opening a secondary, non-essential channel that can be thought of as a “backdoor”. This gives Efsevin a unique, and patent pending, ability to correct the ion misregulation that causes cardiac arrhythmia.
4. Mote (First Place Winner) - Mote is a fleet vehicle carbon capture company committed to capturing the CO2 emissions of buses, more than 99.9% of which run on fossil fuels, until their decades-away electrification. Using patent pending rooftop mount system, they instantly decarbonize fleet vehicles at no hassle. The rooftop mount system holds interchangeable, carbon-capturing filters. Hoses interconnect the system, ultimately attaching to a vehicle’s exhaust pipe, allowing us to capture 40 miles of CO2 at a time. CO2 is recycled into ethylene, the building block of everyday plastic goods.
5. Riders Share - With over 500 motorcycles listed in the U.S., Riders Share is the Airbnb of motorcycle rentals. Riders Share is a two-sided online platform that connects unused motorcycles to vetted riders that want to rent them. By getting rid of brick & mortar costs as well as motorcycle depreciation, Riders Share intends to disrupt and grow the market for renting motorcycles. With roughly 27 million licensed motorcycle riders in the U.S. to only 9 million registered motorcycles, the potential to grow the motorcycle rentals market is there.
6. Vanth (Audience Favorite Award Winner) - Vanth will be the first fully customizable made-to-measure clothing platform.  The mass production of clothing and the demand for the latest fashions at cheap prices has come at the detriment of garment workers with workers making as low as $0.25 an hour in terrible working conditions. On the consumer side, surveys have shown that both men and women have trouble finding properly fitting clothing. In addition, the current way people get custom clothing is broken and unaffordable with no price transparency or selection. The ultimate goal of the platform is to empower and enable seamstresses and tailors to earn fair, living wages and create sustainable, self-sufficient communities.

Past Competitions

Learn about last year's Final Round of Lowell Milken Institute-Sandler Prize for New Entrepreneurs Competition here.