Startup Columbia is a series of campus-wide startup competitions offering non-dilutive cash prizes to the winning teams. Applications open in early January each year and are open to early-stage ventures founded, managed, and owned by current Columbia students, or by Columbia alumni within 5 years of their most recent Columbia degree.

 

Each year, alumni judges evaluate competitors in each of the various competitions. All competitions have their own focus, save for the OPEN Competition, which is open to any kind of business model, including not-for-profit and social enterprises. As you will see in the Rules & Regulations, teams who wish to compete must choose to enter one competition only.

 

Thank you to all who participated in the 2023 competitions! Please come back January 1, 2024, for updated content, prize information, and open applications.

Open Track

The StartupColumbia Challenge is open to all Columbia University students and recent alumni (five years or less from their most recent degree) who are working on a startup. For details on eligibility, please see the Rules and Regulations section.

What are judges looking for? 

Judges are looking at a number of factors. One very important factor is whether there is clear evidence of the founder’s significant understanding of the customer gleaned through the hard work involved in customer discovery interviews. Judges will also be assessing the talent of the team- their communication skills, ability to build product, sell the product, their understanding of their market, as well as their level of dedication and grit. Is there a working MVP that the team has been testing with early customers? Early signs of traction and progress on key metrics will also be taken into account. 

Awards

Undergraduate Prize, Sponsored by Columbia College and run by CORE

First Place: $15,000

Second Place: $10,000

Third Place: $5,000

 

Graduate Prize, Sponsored by Columbia Entrepreneurship

First Place: $15,000

Second Place: $10,000

Third Place: $5,000

Registration Closed
Technology Track

Technology Track


The Millard Chan ’99 Technology Challenge is open to all Columbia University students and recent alumni (five years or less from their most recent degree). Teams must have one Columbia Engineering founding member (recent alumni or student). For details on eligibility, please see the rules and regulations section.

 

All entries to the Technology Challenge must include business models based on a solid foundation of applied, solution-focused, technological innovation. Submissions for this track focus on product development, innovative design, and “builder” technologies including data analytics, biomedical solutions, software, or hardware. Cross-disciplinary teams are strongly encouraged.

 

Awards

Sponsored by Millard Chan ’99

First Place: $25,000

Second Place: $15,000

Third Place: $10,000

Engineering for Humanity

(Prize pool of $25,000)

Sponsored by Columbia Engineering

 

Additional awards may be given to the teams whose submissions best exemplify our Engineering for Humanity vision.

 

Registration Closed
Media Track

The Media Track of the Columbia Venture Challenge is sponsored by the Brown Institute for Media Innovation. Brown is an R&D lab housed in Columbia Journalism School. It supports new technologies for journalism and media production.

“Should I apply? What are the judges looking for?” 

In the Media Track, the Brown Institute encourages applications from new tech-based or tech-enabled ventures working in journalism or media, broadly. These might make novel uses of computer vision, machine learning and AI, NLP, data visualization or even VR/AR to create, communicate, and interpret content. As Brown is housed at Columbia Journalism School, it extends a special welcome to ventures that focus on the practice of journalism — developing tools to aid investigations, say, or designing new visualization platforms to experience stories. Projects might also address the business of journalism, perhaps proposing new models for local media or sustainable approaches to delivering content to underserved communities.

Here are some of the past winners of the Media Track and the problems they were solving:

  • [Verifying Content] Sourceable is an online platform and mobile application that empowers, supports, and connects citizen journalists in conflict and crises zones to document, verify, archive, and share critical data with media, human rights groups, and prosecutors.

 

  • [Citizen Journalism] The Vngle News Agency is a grassroots Associated Press for local news. Targeting editors seeking local news to publish, Vngle is a nonpartisan content newswire deploying reporter training, a local news content database, and patented mobile forensics to catalog insights across underserved areas.

 

  • [Making Journalism Pay] CollabWORK is the first community-powered hiring platform to help creators and media brands find short-term work and workers to collaborate and tell great stories. CollabWORK taps into curated professional communities for fast, nuanced sourcing, modern referrals, and dependable candidates you can count on.

 

  • [Data Collection and Analysis] The Indian Data Explorer is an organization that “liberates” Indian public datasets by taking the responsibility of ensuring that any data released by the government is cleaned up, readied and made available freely for the general public.

 

  • [Misinformation] Palver reliably monitors public sentiment on the encrypted social media platforms WhatsApp and Telegram to combat misinformation and fake news.

 

  • [A New Platform for Conversation] Skolay lets you speak to the authors who speak to your heart. Skolay creates a centralized marketplace to encourage and facilitate these conversations, for the benefit of readers seeking deeper engagement with writers they love, and writers craving closer connection with their dedicated readers as well as supplemental income.

Awards

Unlike other challenges, the Media Track is just the start of a larger competition that could award up to $100,000 for a lucky team. Here is a complete listing of Brown’s opportunities.

  1. Winning teams will receive cash prizes — $5,000 for third place, $10,000 for second place, and $15,000 for the top project.
  2. In addition, the three winning teams will also receive paid 12-week fellowships — up to two people per team — to participate in Brown’s 2024 Summer Entrepreneurship Program. This experience has been designed to help teams develop their ideas and produce a prototype. (These fellowships are on top of the cash prize awards.)
  3. Brown’s summer program ends with a final competition which could award one of the participating teams up to $100,000 to continue work on their venture!

Eligibility

Columbia University students and recent alumni (five years or less from their most recent degree) who are working on a startup. For details on eligibility, please see the Rules and Regulations section for the Columbia Venture Challenge.

Registration Closed
Global Policy Challenge

SIPA Annual Global Policy Challenge (the Challenge) is focused on the following themes: (1) Geopolitical Stability; (2) Democratic Resilience; (3) Climate and Sustainable Development; (4) Inclusive Prosperity and Macroeconomics Stability.

Student teams are invited to apply to participate in the annual challenge and come up with innovative ideas that leverage technology and/or data to solve these themes.

Teams must include one SIPA student but may draw from other schools across campus including computer science, engineering, business, public health, etc. In addition, one team will be selected with a specific focus on Brazil. 

SIPA’s Annual Global Policy Challenge is composed of three (3) rounds of competition. A total of $50,000 will be awarded to the winning teams.  Note: Teams must be set up as a legal entity to receive the prize money.

For any questions, please contact us at SIPA.Challenge.Grant@columbia.edu

The application for the 2023-2024 SIPA Annual Global Policy Challenge is now open. 

Applications are due by October 2nd, 2023 at 11:59am.  Please visit this page to see required application materials.

To apply, please submit your materials via email to: SIPA.Challenge.Grant@columbia.edu

Registration Open

Columbia Venture Competition Rules and Regulations

Updated November 2023

Eligibility

Composition of Eligible Teams:

  • STARTUP COLUMBIA is intended for early-stage ventures founded, managed, and owned by current Columbia students or by Columbia alumni within 5 years of their most recent Columbia degree. These Competitions are not meant for mature ventures.
  • “Blended Teams”: Some teams founded by current Columbia students or Columbia alumni within 5 years of graduation may have a non-Columbia-affiliated co-founder. We will use the term “Blended Teams” to describe such applicants. To be eligible to compete and collect any awards, the founders of such Blended Teams must document the role all founders have had in the conception and development of the venture. To be eligible, such “Blended Teams” must have at least one current Columbia student or recent alumnus (within 5 years of graduation) who is a true founder who joined the team at the inception of the venture and has played a significant role in the company. The Columbia student or alumni founder should be the one to apply for the STARTUP COLUMBIA on behalf of the team. If there should be any question about this issue and/or if it is in dispute, the STARTUP COLUMBIA administrators’ rulings on eligibility will be final. To protect privacy, the outcomes of eligibility will not be shared beyond the impacted team.
  • In the application process, all team members are asked to state their university and school affiliation with graduation degree and year. STARTUP COLUMBIA administrators may also require proof of the length of time each founder has been engaged in their venture and may ask for access to the venture’s cap table. Refusal to provide this data will result in disqualification.
  • ** If the Administrators of any Competition within STARTUP COLUMBIA deem that a team has tried to circumvent the Rules & Regulations in any way, such teams will be disqualified. These Competitions are for real Columbia teams, with real Columbia founders. For example, any efforts to camouflage what are essentially non-Columbia teams as Columbia-founded teams (as has happened before unfortunately) will lead to immediate disqualification.

Amount of Dilutive Money Raised:

  • Teams that have raised $250K or more of dilutive investment are NOT eligible to apply for these Competitions.

Intellectual Property

  • Eligible applicants that are commercializing technologies or IP licensed from Columbia University are eligible to compete, but ownership of the IP must be clearly stated and documented in the application process.
  • For all applicants, ownership of intellectual property and equity splits in the business must not be in dispute.

Number of Competitions a Team May Apply For:

  • Teams may only enter one Competition per year. (See descriptions of each competition above)
  • Teams who have won or placed in the top three for any STARTUP COLUMBIA Competition in prior years may not enter the same Competition again with the same business. However, the same team can enter another Competition or enter with another completely distinct business. For example, a top-three team from the 2023 OPEN Competition may enter the 2024 Policy Competition with the same business or the 2024 OPEN Competition with a completely different business.

Lastly, certain Competitions further restrict the eligibility requirements for teams. It is up to the team to fully review all eligibility requirements before entering a particular Competition. Teams that enter a Competition for which they are not eligible may be disqualified or asked to join another Competition. Where possible and practical, disqualifications are not publicly announced.

Process

  • Teams can apply to only one Competition.
  • If accepted into a Competition, each team will be contacted with their pitch schedule.
  • Unless otherwise announced, most pitches teams make will be held via Zoom, although most finals may be live and in person.
  • Once the judging is complete, three winners will be announced for each Competition (1st place, 2nd Place, 3rd Place). It is possible that two teams will tie for a given finishing place, in these cases, the award is split.
    • Winners will be announced shortly after the Finals.

Non-Disclosure Agreements

STARTUP COLUMBIA does not support non-disclosure agreements. Teams should be aware that STARTUP COLUMBIA administrators will not require judges to sign non-disclosure agreements. Participants’ executive summaries, videos, and pitch decks will only be seen by the STARTUP COLUMBIA administrators and the judging panel. Neither of those documents will be distributed more broadly unless explicit permission is received from the participating team. We advise that teams provide as much detail as possible without disclosing proprietary information or unprotected IP.