For the past 15 years The IndUS Entrepreneurs (TiE) have held a one-day professional and networking conference (TiECON) for entrepreneurs in the Southeast featuring keynote speakers with entrepreneurial experience, mentoring workshops, and a chance for adult and youth inventors to pitch their ideas to groups of venture capital and angel investors. This year, TiECON SE was held on April the 26th at the Renaissance Waverly Hotel in Atlanta and included a special event for university teams to pitch their ideas to the investors and mentors in attendance. With 12 teams in the TYE University Pitch Category, Georgia Tech’s Cardio Vision team, headed by Toby Xu and mentored on campus by Professor Levent Degertekin; George W. Woodruff Chair in Mechanical Systems, placed 2nd overall.

The Cardio Vision Team had 10 minutes to pitch their business plan to market a forward-looking intravascular ultrasound catheter with 3D volumetric imaging capabilities for the diagnosis and treatment of coronary and structural heart diseases to the investor voting panel. During their pitch the team covered their research in the target market and industry analysis; the competitive differentiation of their product; their preliminary financial and risk management plan; and near future milestones that need to be achieved before the product can hit the market such as FDA clearance and an investor reimbursement strategy.

The vision for the team’s product was born out of Mr. Xu’s and alumni graduate students’ collaborative graduate work, under the guidance of Professor Degertekin, to develop high-frame-rate medical imaging that integrates the imaging transducer array with the transmitting and receiving electronics embedded on a single chip. The ultimate goal is to reduce the size of such imaging devices and reduce chip-interconnect complexity for ease of manufacturing.

For their 2nd place win, the team was awarded $3,000 to continue to move their invention to market. Congratulations Mr. Xu, Professor Degertekin, and the entire Cardio Vision team! For more information on Mr. Xu’s work, check out the original paper the product was based upon at the link here. For more information on the work at the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology visit the site here. For information on TiE Atlanta and their events, visit their website here.