A startup making emergency housing cheaper and faster to deploy won this year\u2019s MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition on May 12.<\/p>\n
Uplift Microhome is building reusable, modular housing units to provide housing on demand to people affected by natural disasters and other emergencies. Each of the company\u2019s homes has its own batteries and water reservoir, allowing them to quickly be transported and placed off-grid.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery year, millions of Americans are displaced by natural disasters,\u201d said co-founder Charlie Nitschelm, who is in MIT\u2019s Leaders for Global Operations program, earning a master\u2019s in engineering and an MBA. \u201cIf they’re lucky, they can stay with friends or family. If they\u2019re not so lucky, they could end up in a homeless shelter. But disasters aren\u2019t just two-week problems. It takes months, sometimes years, to get back to what life was like before. Bottom line: We lack dignified and affordable housing after disasters.\u201d<\/p>\n
Uplift Microhome was one of seven teams chosen to pitch at the final event, which took place inside a packed Kresge Auditorium. Each team got five minutes to pitch their startups before a few minutes of questioning from judges.<\/p>\n
This year\u2019s competition started in April with more than 80 applications. The program\u2019s judges selected 16 teams to compete in the semifinal before whittling that number down to the finalist teams for Tuesday\u2019s event.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis competition isn\u2019t just about one big night,\u201d $100K managing director and MIT Sloan School of Management student Celine Christory said. \u201cIt\u2019s a year-long journey for our organizers and students. It kicks off with the \u2018Pitch\u2019 event in December, moves to \u2018Accelerate\u2019 in March, and culminates in the \u2018Launch\u2019 event.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the pitch that won the $100,000 Danny Lewin Grand Prize, Nitschelm said it takes an average of four months for the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to deploy single-use housing after a disaster. That\u2019s because these homes require power and utilities in addition to extensive foundation preparation.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs a result, less than 1 percent of survivors actually receive a physical home,\u201d Nitschelm said. \u201cThe rest get a check and are told to go figure it out. This isn\u2019t just our opinion. The Department of Homeland Security audited FEMA and recommended providing a cost-effective housing alternative that allows disaster survivors to stay close to their home.\u201d<\/p>\n
Uplift\u2019s homes can be transported on the back of a tractor trailer and deployed using a standard forklift. In addition to its battery and water reservoir, the homes feature self-leveling bases that allow them to be deployed on uneven terrain.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat dramatically simplifies delivery, installation, and deactivation to the point where you can economically recover, refurbish, and redeploy the unit,\u201d says co-founder Trevor O\u2019Leary, a student at Harvard Business School.<\/p>\n
The company has already built a home and believes it can manufacture each unit at a cost similar to the cheapest tractor trailer while delivering housing in hours. The company expects the marginal cost of reusing each unit to be an order of magnitude less expensive than current solutions. Down the line, it plans to deploy homes to combat housing insecurity, for seasonal workers and during construction projects. It plans to manufacture its homes in the United States.<\/p>\n
The second-place $50,000 David T. Morgenthaler Founder\u2019s Prize was awarded to the startup Mohan, which is using generative artificial intelligence to map the Earth\u2019s subsurface in three dimensions. The company is deploying its technology to help mining companies decide where to drill, starting by targeting copper deposits.<\/p>\n
\u201cEveryone is talking about AI and chips, but no one is talking about what they sit on: copper,\u201d said co-founder Hongze Bo, a PhD student in MIT\u2019s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. \u201cEvery cable, GPU, and data center depends on copper. By 2030, we\u2019re going to be 4 million tons of copper short. But we don’t know where the next deposit is. Today we just drill and hope.\u201d<\/p>\n
The core of Mohan\u2019s technology is a diffusion AI model that iteratively removes noise from subsurface data to create underground scans. The company also develops its own subsurface data.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe built a full, 3D subsurface model using generative AI,\u201d explained Bo. \u201cIt\u2019s the same technology behind [image generation tools] Sora and Midjourney.\u201d<\/p>\n
The third place\u00a0$5,000 prize went to Iceberg Systems, which is using autonomous AI agents to predict how risk cascades across the economy. The company invented a new class of AI systems at MIT that coordinates millions of AIs to simulate how risks emerge through interaction. It has been working with the Department of Energy.<\/p>\n
\u201cIceberg simulates behaviors across millions of market participants, from brokers to consumers to institutions, to simulate and predict how shocks cascade through their interactions and create systemic risk in the economy,\u201d says co-founder and MIT PhD student Ayush Chopra.<\/p>\n
The $5,000 Audience Choice Prize went to Pixology, an agentic AI platform that creates on-brand, sponsor-ready sports content to help monetize live moments.<\/p>\n
The other finalists that presented at this year\u2019s event were:<\/p>\n
NeuralPhysics, which is building foundation physics models and agents for hardware design simulation and manufacturing;DesignFlownAI, a design intelligence app embedded in computer-aided design software to give engineers insights in real time; andAuto Lab, an autonomous AI platform that helps teams build better models faster.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The $100K Entrepreneurship Competition is one of MIT\u2019s annual flagship entrepreneurial events. It began more than 30 years ago when a group of students, along with the late Ed Roberts, who was the founder and chair of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, decided to start a startup pitch competition.<\/p>\n
The prize started at $10,000 then grew to $50,000 before reaching today\u2019s $100,000 grand prize. Past participants include HubSpot, Akamai, and Lightmatter.<\/p>\n
In addition to the prizes, teams received mentorship from venture capitalists, serial entrepreneurs, corporate executives, and attorneys; funding for prototypes; business plan feedback; and more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A startup making emergency housing cheaper and faster to deploy won this year\u2019s MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":650888,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[28,158,280773,280772,280771],"class_list":["post-650887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entrepreneurship","tag-business","tag-entrepreneurship","tag-mit-100k-entrepreneurship-competition","tag-mohan","tag-uplift-microhome"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=650887"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650887\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/650888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=650887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=650887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=650887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}