DisrupTexas 2018 Awards $55,000 to Undergraduate Startups

Five Texas startup teams took home cash and prizes in McCombs’ second annual pitch competition.

Undergraduate teams competed in DisrupTexas, the second annual “Shark Tank”-style pitch competition sponsored by the Herb Kelleher Center for Entrepreneurship at the McCombs School of Business.

DisrupTexas is the largest pitch competition in terms of cash awards for Texas-based undergraduate students. In addition to a monetary prize, the contest awards software credits from Oracle worth $15,000. The competition aims to serve as a launch pad for budding student entrepreneurs.

Flo Recruit, headed by Katherine Allen, a junior in mechanical engineering and Plan II Honors at UT Austin, took home first place and $20,000. Flo Recruit enables companies to hire talent by capturing candidate data in seconds, gathering employee feedback, and providing recruiters with data and insights never before available.

Second place and $10,000 went to Pigeon, founded by UT freshman Jatin Kumar. Pigeon is an intelligent, real-time communication platform empowering business productivity and cross-language communication. The service integrates with conferencing to provide closed captioning and analytics.

Other winners and awards:

● 3rd place, Survivr, UT Dallas, $5,000

● 4th place, Pro Lit Fic, UT Austin, $3,000

● 5th place, Dive, UT Austin, $2,000

Out of 100 applications, 25 undergraduate finalists from six Texas universities presented their 10-minute pitches to four expert judges and 60 members of the entrepreneurship community, receiving professional feedback and mentorship in the Texas startup ecosystem.