Aerate, a student-founded startup behind a high-efficiency air conditioner unit, took the main prize at Penn Wharton Entrepreneurship’s Startup Challenge on Friday.
With the 30,000 cash prize — plus another $15,000 in in-kind services — the nascent startup will continue work on its air conditioner unit, a high-efficiency product that pledges 20 times the efficiency of existing air coolers and also acts a dehumidifier.
“The Startup Showcase prize money and in-kind services will be hugely impactful for Aerate’s continued development,” the founders said in an email. “We already had plans to build the next iteration of our prototype in the next several months, but we were not sure how to fund it. Now that we have the funding, we will be continuing our prototyping to optimize our system further.”
Specially designed for high-humidity environments — like India, where CFO and cofounder Ashwin Kishen’s family lives — the Aerate unit is expected to go to market in 2021.
Aerate battled against a wide lineup of Penn startups, from the makers of an advertising platform for rideshare vehicles to a biosensing system for the fruit supply chain.
Join our growing Slack community
Join 5,000 tech professionals and entrepreneurs in our community Slack today!
Donate to the Journalism Fund
Your support powers our independent journalism. Unlike most business-media outlets, we don’t have a paywall. Instead, we count on your personal and organizational contributions.
Does the Spark Therapeutics writedown undermine Philly’s biotech swagger?
Like electricity in the 20th century, broadband access is now an economic necessity
Healthcare providers and digital navigators join forces to close the health equity divide
