Four Student-Founded AI Companies Win Cornell Tech Startup Awards

Four student-founded AI companies won $100,000 investments at Cornell Tech's annual Startup Awards competition on May 14. Nearly 600 students, university leaders, entrepreneurs, and tech executives gathered on the Cornell Tech campus to hear 11 finalist teams pitch startup ideas. This year's cohort tackled a wide range of technological challenges, from AI safety and agentic systems to predictive healthcare, satellite collision risk, and legal and financial decision making. The Startup Awards are a capstone of the Studio program, a core component of the Cornell Tech master's degree. In their final semester, students can choose to form teams and enroll in Startup Studio, where they develop, test, and refine startup ideas in an academic setting. The Startup Award winners will receive post-academic investments valued at $100,000, along with studio space and ongoing mentorship to help transform pre-seed companies into scalable ventures in New York City. The winning teams are Aiseptor, which stops AI exam fraud by installing a built-in security layer on candidates' devices; Custos, which wraps existing payment infrastructure with programmable spending policies; Kindred, which offers an AI reasoning engine that maps medical device regulation; and Lola, which uses AI to capture a company's institutional knowledge. Two runner-ups were also selected: CoagHealth and MedComm. The winners were announced by Andrew Ross Sorkin, and the Studio program is led by Chief Practice Officer Josh Hartmann.

(Source：Cornell Chronicle)