Congratulations to Longhorn Life Sciences, the Fall 2024 TVLIC Texas Champion!

The Fall 2024 Texas Venture Labs Investment Competition was held on Friday, December 6 featuring the top graduate student startups on the UT campus. Twenty-nine companies competed in five Semifinal rounds in the morning with the winners advancing to the Finals in Crum Auditorium in the afternoon.

Longhorn Life Sciences was awarded the top prize of $15,000 for enveloping needs-driven solutions to improve patient outcomes and experiences. Their technology, “iDetect”, is a wound monitoring system for remotely detecting infections in post-operative cancer patients. The system will reduce the subjective burden on patients to accurately report their symptoms and improve clinical coordination. iDetect will reduce surgical site infection cost burden by enabling proactive intervention, de-escalating costly, intensive care, and increasing hospital efficiency. Congratulations to James Clarke, PhD in Physics in the College of Natural Sciences, for bringing home the win!

The Texas Superstar and $5,000 prize went to Avid, which makes growing fresh, pesticide-free food as easy as pressing a button. You can tell their app what you want to grow, insert our seed pods, and watch for notifications to add more water. Avid automates the rest so you don’t need to have the time or green thumb to do so yourself. Congratulations to Fred Lindseth, MBA, McCombs School of Business, 2026.

The Texas Rising Star and $2,500 prize went to Krishnan Ram (MS in Mechanical Engineering, 2025) of Paradigm Robotics. Paradigm Robotics is an Austin, Texas based robotics startup building advanced and versatile robotic platform solutions to provide mission critical situational awareness for firefighting, disaster response, industrial/manufacturing, and other industries. 

Trinity Tube and CerebroSonic were both awarded prizes for Health Innovation and an additional $5,000 prize.

MagSuture was the winner of the Technology Commercialization Award and $10,000 prize.

The Sustainability Award and $5,000 prize went to Facilimax.

The James D. Pippin Veteran Entrepreneurship Award and a $1,000 prize went to Brown Bag Games .

All twenty-nine teams also presented two-minute pitches in the Ann Whitt Elevator Pitch Challenge which awards a $1,000 prize to the top three presenters. The winners were Trinity Tube, Brown Bag Games and Greeni Tahini.

Congratulations to all of the graduate student startups who competed in the Fall 2024 Texas Venture Labs Investment Competition! And thanks to all of our judges, sponsors and volunteers who made it possible. We’re looking forward to seeing you at TVLIC’s 40th Anniversary competition on May 2ND, 2025!