The 13th edition of the McGill Dobson Cup powered by National Bank, was the first to be held fully online. Over 56 teams were initially selected to be a part of the highly competitive program in January.
The finals, which were held on March 29 and 30, saw the 26 finalist teams competing in four tracks to win over $200 000 in funding:
- Health Sciences Enterprise (HSE)
- Innovation or Technology Driven Enterprise (ITDE)
- Social Impact Enterprise (SIE)
- Environmental Enterprise (EE)
This year's competition highlighted the value of forward-looking innovation and diversity. Notably, the finalists came from 8 McGill Faculties, 10 countries and 21 other universities.
The 135 founders, 96 of which stem from McGill, were accompanied throughout the program by more than 60 seasoned entrepreneurs who shared their knowledge and expertise through mentoring sessions, workshops and judging.
Congratulations to this year’s teams and a sincere thank you to everyone who participated and contributed to make the 2021 McGill Dobson Cup a success.
See the winners for the 4 Tracks in the McGill Dobson Cup:
- Health & Science Enterprise Track
- Environmental Enterprise
- Innovation & Technology Driven Enterprise
- Social Impact Enterprise
Additional Prizes:
- Mastercard Foundation Startup Awards
- Murdoch Family Initiative Award
- Steven Pal Family Award
- Avmor Prize for Social Responsibility
Health and Science Enterprise Track
1st Place - Healthybud
Healthybud is a pet wellness company helping animals thrive through research-backed nutrition, education and community. Working alongside universities, vets and nutritionists, Healthybud empowers pet-parents to best care for their pets.
2nd Place - Journey of Surgery
JoS is an AI-powered communication application that facilitates informed and shared decision-making between patients, families, and surgical teams. Their initial focus is to improve the experience and outcomes for children undergoing surgery.
3rd Place - Remote Optical
Remote Optical provides medical devices that allow ophthalmologists and optometrists to remotely examine, diagnose and track optical diseases, disorders, and damage.
Environmental Enterprise Track
1st Place - Algi
Algi creates purpose driven food products centred around the world’s oldest and smallest superfood, spirulina algae.
2nd Place - Food Bundles
Food Bundles is a digital platform designed to optimize the distribution of fresh food to consumers living in cities. Digitizing the supply chain, it creates a sustainable market for smallholder farmers.
3rd Place - Fellow
Transforming not only the storage industry, but also the way we manage our things entirely.
Innovation & Technology Driven Enterprise
1st place - Rydesafely
The Rydersafely platform validates that autonomous systems can perceive unforeseen dangers - or edge cases - around them. This unblocks automotives to mandated assisted driving in 2021 and the $2.5 trillion self-driving future.
2nd place - Squarefeet.ai
SquareFeet.ai optimizes the revenue of a new residential development project by offering automated market research, automated initial price list generation and a demand driven dynamic price optimization.
3rd place - Acrylic Technologies
Acrylic is a pre-launch hardtech startup helping professional artists sell their artwork at scale by rethinking how paintings are produced.
Social Impact Enterprise Track
1st place - Gualtieri Inventions
The Universal Seating Apparatus conforms to the needs of people with various disabilities, alleviating their discomfort on an airplane. Gualtieri Inventions' aim is to include and promote the well-being of people with disabilities in air travel. They are continuously striving to improve and provide solutions and support for this community.
2nd place - Keen to Help
A social network whereby users build their volunteer profiles to enable seamless volunteer onboarding with the goal of encouraging volunteerism amongst university students.
3rd place - My Media Creative
My Media Creative is a youth-run non-profit creative agency serving social impact organizations across Canada. They also run skills- development programs where young people are connected to creative mentorship and meaningful experiential learning projects with under-resourced non-profits.
Mastercard Foundation Startup Awards
Established under the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program at McGill University the MCF-Dobson Startup Awards supports ventures competing in the Social Impact Enterprise track of the McGill Dobson Cup. The awards will be offered to viable, sustainable, and scalable social ventures and community projects that create economic opportunities for others.
1st place - Nurture Posterity International Ltd
A private, not-for-profit social impact enterprise organization that aims at improving the overall health of women and children through fostering optimal feeding programmes and nutrition-sensitive agricultural programmes in African communities.
2nd place - Food Bundles
Food Bundles is a digital platform designed to optimize the distribution of fresh food to consumers living in cities. Digitizing the supply chain, it creates a sustainable market for smallholder farmers.
Murdoch Family Initiative Award
Established by Neil Murdoch (BCom‘81) and Gisele Murdoch to help support undergraduate students in the Desautels Faculty of Management to take the initiative to gain practical experience during their studies and to encourage students to be creative and entrepreneurial. The award will be for a student, in good academic standing, who has demonstrated entrepreneurial talent and initiative and is involved in an entrepreneurial venture.
My Place du Marche develops IT infrastructure to improve food nonprofits’ operations by creating a digital marketplace through a centralized network of volunteers and organizations.
Steven Pal Family Award
Established in 2020 by Steven Pal, BSc 1979, MBA 1981, to encourage students enrolled in the Desautels Faculty of Management’s Dobson Cup Program to be creative and entrepreneurial.
Hepius Medical is developing smart cardiac catheter technology to assist surgeons in delivering safer and more effective ablation therapy to patients with cardiac arrhythmia.
Avmor Prize for Social Responsibility
Established in 2003 through the generosity of Mr. Avrum Morrow for an outstanding undergraduate student, or group of students, who focus(es) their efforts on social responsibility.
A social network whereby users build their volunteer profiles to enable seamless volunteer onboarding with the goal of encouraging volunteerism amongst university students.
