The Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship’s Dempsey Startup Competition has a long history of success. Whether the teams go on to make their business a reality or not, everyone walks away with new contacts, fresh angles, and feedback to improve upon. This low-risk trial in entrepreneurship is why hundreds of students apply each year.
The beginning of this competition takes us back to the late 1990s when a group of MBA students spent a semester researching business plan competitions to see if they could make one work at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business. Through their research and the hard work of others who built the entrepreneurship program at UW, the first UW Business Plan Competition was launched in 1998. Twenty-two teams entered their business plans in the very first competition.
This event has sparked the entrepreneurial spirit in countless students and changed the course of so many careers since 1988. I’m so proud to be part of this ongoing legacy.
You can dive into the first 25 years of the Dempsey Startup Competition here!
One of the greatest privileges of supporting this competition is hearing the success stories as students take what they learned and run with it in the real world. Read on for some of my favourite stories.
Founded by David Younger and Randolph Lopez, A-Alpha Bio is a biotechnology company that harnesses synthetic biology and machine learning to measure, predict and engineer protein-protein interactions. They were founded in 2017 at the University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design and Center for Synthetic Biology. They went on to win the Dempsey Startup Competition and the Holloman Health Innovation Challenge in 2018—the first team to win both!
Since their win, they have gone on to raise more than $51 million, grow their team and develop two platforms:
A-Alpha Bio was founded to understand how proteins interact with one another. Why? Because their interactions have implications for almost every disease. If teams like A-Alpha Bio can understand and engineer these interactions, they can begin to cure a long list of diseases.
Find the A-Alpha Bio team featured in this video to learn more about their life-saving innovation!
Their tagline, “The first tactile sports broadcast,” says it all. OneCourt’s haptic display allows blind and low-vision fans to experience live sports.
They were founded in 2021 when Jerred Mace stumbled upon a video of a blind man watching a soccer match with a sighted woman moving his hands across a tactile board to represent everything happening on the field. He was moved enough to build a team and turn this approach into a widely available tech solution. Their innovation utilizes trackable vibrations to help fans at home and in stadiums connect with the action.
They won 3rd place at the 2022 Dempsey Startup Competition. Since then, they’ve:
Founded in 2018 by brothers Garrett and Courtland King, Perfect Coffee Water (PCW) developed the “perfect” chemistry for water used to brew coffee. It all began when Courtland shared his experimentations on coffee water chemistry with his brother, showing him how to make a great-tasting cup of coffee without adding cream and sugar.
The King brothers’ idea landed them in the Sweet 16 round of the Dempsey Startup Competition in 2020. They also went through the Jones + Foster Accelerator Program to bring their idea to the next level.
In January 2025, PCW was acquired by Third Wave Water, an established coffee water company. Their recipe will remain the same and will now be offered alongside Third Wave Water’s products.
LifeAt offers immersive, distraction-free workspaces to help everyone from marketers to designers focus. They utilize Attention Restoration Theory (ART) to create digital environments that improve productivity.
Users get to customize their workspace and make use of tools like:
LifeAt’s founding team, Devin Ajimine, Marisa Chentakul, Ashika Mulagada, and Pouya Rad, advanced to the Sweet 16 Round in the 2022 Dempsey Startup Competition. Since then, they’ve raised $3M in funding and made it onto the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2023!
The 2024 recipient of the $25,000 Grand Prize, BioLegacy has the potential to revolutionize organ transplant availability. Their tech aims to extend donor organ viability from 24 hours to years by using organ cryopreservation and electromagnetic rewarming technologies.
They’re still new on the scene and enjoying the pitching competition scene in the Pacific Northwest, securing 2nd place at the 2025 Seattle Startup Competition. Check them out in GeekWire!
Founded in 2015 by Orla Concannon, Eldergrow aims to improve the quality of life for people living with dementia. As of April 22nd, 2025 (Earth Day), Eldergrow was acquired by Eugeria. A Montreal-based company, Eugeria is transforming dementia care through innovation. Find details about their acquisition here.
Going forward, Eldergrow will offer indoor garden models and a flexible curriculum designed to improve the quality of life for residents of senior living communities and memory care settings.
This one goes all the way back to 2003! NanoString Technologies was a trailblazer in spatial biology, the study of tissues within their own 2D or 3D context. With spatial biology, NanoString gained an understanding of the spatial architecture of cells and how they interact with their surroundings. This technology has implications for fields like oncology, neurobiology, immune-oncology, and more.
Now, NanoString provides scientists around the world with the ability to picture cells’ interactions in three dimensions through three systems:
NanoString Technologies has been revolutionizing spatial biology for more than 20 years! They were the Grand Prize winners at the 2003 Dempsey Startup Competition, and their co-founder, Amber Ratcliffe, won the first UW Alumni Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2022. They were the first team in the history of the competition to IPO!
From 22 teams in 1998 to a record-breaking 174 submissions in 2025, it’s been an incredible journey. I’ve been fortunate enough to judge the Sweet 16 round many times, and I can’t say enough about how inspiring these young entrepreneurs are.
The beauty of this competition is in its ability to change people’s trajectory. Some students ditch their plans to go into a technical field and become career entrepreneurs. Others catch the eye of folks in the investment community and find their future there. Some go on to perfect their pitch and launch their companies for real.
For those inspired to get involved or give back, you can reach out to the Buerk Centre Director, Amy Sallin, at asallin@uw.edu. We’d love to chat about how you can impact future competitions!
There is something for everyone in the Dempsey Startup Competition community. I can’t wait to meet another fantastic group of entrepreneurs at this year’s Sweet 16 event! Check out this release from the Beurk Center for Entrepreneurship to learn more about the teams advancing in the 2025 competition!
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