Meet the winners of Morgan State’s inaugural Bear Tank pitch contest

A sensor-equipped electronic skateboard and a platform for better sentence comprehension were among the big ideas that caught judges’ attention at Morgan State University’s first-ever Bear Tank pitch competition.

Just four of the 12 finalists in this contest, which Morgan State hosted for students in late October, took home $1,000 awards. The funding for the “Shark Tank”-inspired competition’s awards came from a grant that the university and its Entrepreneurial Development and Assistance Center (EDAC) earned via the Blackstone Charitable Foundation’s LaunchPad program, which is designed to support entrepreneurship at schools primarily serving students from underrepresented communities.

The skateboard

One of the winners was Sagar Gurung, a 40-year-old architecture grad student who this year finished the prototype for his Sotantra OD electric skateboard. Unlike other skateboards, the Sotantra is equipped with a four-inch clearance and air tires to tackle all-terrain conditions. The board includes semi-autonomous obstacle detection, and the battery pack currently provides a 30-mile range on one charge. It is currently designed with environmental sustainability in mind, with Gurung saying that much of it is made of bamboo.

“It gives a 30-mile range, and it’s all-terrain, so it can go all over the city,” Gurung told Technical.ly. “Or you can go for recreation trails. The idea is to have more optimal mobility for everybody, for basic needs [like] going to work and home, or doing other leisurely stuff.”

The Sotantra’s creator is taking development slowly and eventually looking to market the product through a brick-and-mortar location in Baltimore, where he can offer it as a lifestyle product. That would include offering riding lessons and allowing users to customize their own board.

The $1,000 he won through the Bear Tank’s social and climate impact track — one of four categories in which finalists could compete — will go toward seeking out a stronger sustainable material for the Sotantra’s battery case. The bamboo battery case has shown itself to be a weak point in the board design, he said, and not held up to repeated use very well.

Regardless, the creator is committed to Baltimore and finding out if he can make a go of the Sotantra as a real business catalyst for both himself and his neighbors.

“That’s how I want to grow this product and market this product, and get it to the people who want to ride and have the freedom of mobility,” Gurung said. “The basic goal is to start here in Baltimore. We’ve got a lot of open spaces.”

The writing assistant

One of Gurung’s fellow competitors, 25-year-old Morgan State MBA student Oluwakayode Jasanya, also took home a $1,000 award to support the app he cofounded, Scribe. Jasanya, who is also pursuing a STEM master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University, developed the app after he and business partner Elizabeth Ogun found that writing proficiency was a recurring challenge for many people — about 40% of Americans, according to Jasanya’s research.

Scribe aims to tackle that problem with a template-guided system. Jasanya compared its versatility and sentence-analysis capabilities to Canva and Grammarly, respectively.

“Imagine a space where everyone has access to be a better writer,” he said. “That’s what Scribe is doing. We understand the people we are going to be helping are going to be in institutions with students — let’s say, high schools or colleges. There’ll be less burden for writing centers because there’ll be another way for students to become better writers.”

He added that the venture has already earned another small pitch competition prize. Although he’s being careful about expenses, he anticipates that most of the Bear Tank award will fund a contractor’s app development work.

Scribe is also in the middle of validating its likely customer base. Its partners expect to meet with an academic chair at Montgomery College in Rockville, Maryland, with hopeful future meetings thanks to the EDAC’s connections.

The other winners

Jasanya won in the competition’s general business category. Morgan State sophomore Monique Roman won in the health and life science track for her company Amor Fitness, which develops fitness-specific clothing like undergarments for women. The consumer products and service track’s winners were seniors Ryan Jones and Christian Turcios, whose Rush Diagnostics app helps people immediately diagnose issues with their cars before finding local autobody shops.

The experience

Gurung, like Jasanya, described the Bear Tank experience as a motivating force.

“When a platform validates an idea you have, it’s helping [you] to take it to the next level of really getting out in the market commercially,” he said.

EDAC staffers, for their part, are thrilled with the Bear Tank’s results of their Bear Tank. They plan to keep working with the winners, who are now eligible to compete in Blackstone’s national intercollegiate pitch competition and win $10,000.

“We’re the newest kid on the block for Blackstone, so we’re going up against some heavy hitters,” said EDAC codirector Danielle Frisby. “I’m going to do as much as I can to see they get as much exposure as possible, so we can get to development [and] figure out what’s going to be the best fit.”