Rubi Life Wins $40,000 at Utah Entrepreneur Challenge
The event featured the best collegiate entrepreneurs in Utah competing for $100,000 in cash and prizes.
Rubi Life, a Brigham Young University student startup developing a wearable fetal activity tracker, won first place and the $40,000 grand prize at the 2017 Utah Entrepreneur Challenge in April. The event featured the best collegiate entrepreneurs in Utah competing for $100,000 in cash and prizes.
Rubi Life’s fetal activity tracker uses nanotechnology attached to an elastic maternity band to passively track kick count, heartrate and fetal position. Data is sent to the mom’s smartphone and can alert her if the baby is at risk. Rubi Life is a source of maternal peace of mind and could help reduce the risk of stillbirth.
Rubi Life founder Eric Stopper was inspired by his wife’s pregnancy. She was sick, always worried about her baby, and because of complications her son was born early.
Stopper plans to use the $40,000 from the Utah Entrepreneur Challenge to launch a phone app at the end of this year after the current beta-testing phase. “Millennial moms especially will use this,” Stopper says. “We are revolutionizing motherhood.”
Winners From Around the State
Other winners at the challenge included Xlynk Surgical, a team from the University of Utah that is developing a faster, more effective postoperative adhesion barrier. They won Best Presentation ($5,000) and Best Design ($2,000 in-kind).
Cedar Sports is a Southern Utah University team that provides high quality new and used outdoor recreational equipment. They won the online voting People’s Choice Award ($2,500) and the Best Tabling Award ($1,000).
The U’s Portal Power team won the speed pitch event and $1,000. Its innovative Portal Cord charges the cord along with the device. Users can recharge using just the cord even if it is not plugged in.
Emerging Entrepreneur awards of $1,000 each were given to BYU’s Dentium Club and the U’s ENJ Medical team. Dentium Club provides dental-grade whitening delivered to your door for a few dollars a month. The ENJ Medical team is creating a simple, mechanically driven medical device applied to laparoscope lenses to restore the vision field of an operating team while the device is still in the patient.
A Growing Tradition
The Utah Entrepreneur Challenge is a statewide business model competition open to all university students in the state. It is managed by the Lassonde Entrepreneur Institute, an interdisciplinary division of the U’s David Eccles School of Business, and sponsored by Zions Bank.
“The best part of this competition was watching schools all over the state come together to compete in a business model competition,” says Jaron Hall, the student co-chair of the Utah Entrepreneur Challenge. “It was wonderful to see how we were able to have the business competition held at Lassonde Studios for the first time. It was definitely a success.”