Press Release – July 26, 2016: The Yale Entrepreneurial Institute (YEI) held its Demo Day on Thursday, July 21 at Luce Hall—the culminating event of the YEI Fellowship, a 10-week bootcamp for accelerating ventures. YEI is entering its 10th year and the event marked a turning point for its signature program which has traditionally favored scalable, for-profit ventures. “I had the naïve notion that there are businesses that make money and there are businesses that are social,” YEI Managing Director Jim Boyle told the audience. He noted that a talk from tech entrepreneur Mitch Kapor, Partner at Kapor Capital and the Kapor Center for Social Impact, changed his mind. “Mitch showed that these ventures can be high-impact and successful. Now, we see support for social impact as a very important driver that brings people to YEI that want to save the world in some way. This is where Yale is most comfortable—we want to do things that have impact.”
Of this year’s 11 teams, seven are social impact ventures—ventures that have at their core a mission to benefit the environment, public health, education or equality. Two of these deal with the issue of food waste—including Renewal Mill from Sumit Kadakia (MEM/MBA ’16) and Claire Schlemme (MEM ’11) which utilizes discarded materials from industrial food production to make healthy products beginning with flour made from okara, a byproduct of soy production. Also in the food waste space is Re-Harvest Foods from founder Cat Wu (SOM ’17) which transforms unused produce into small-batch, specialty applesauce called Ugly Fruit.
Two ventures address serious public health concerns. PremieBreathe—featuring a Yale College team that includes Katy Chan (’15), Shirin Ahmed (YC ’12), Charles Stone (YC ’14), Jordan Sabin (YC ‘16) and David Wang (YC ’18)—is developing a low-cost breathing aid for newborns. Around the world 1.5 million infants die from preventable respiratory illnesses, nearly all of them in the developing world. Spring, which won the Audience Vote at this year’s Demo Day, provides an innovative way to match depressed patients with more effective treatment. The team has developed an online questionnaire which outperforms existing tests and psychiatrists. The matching relies on an algorithm developed via rigorous research published in the Lancet by the startup’s Chief Scientist Adam Chekroud (PhD ’20). Spring is currently being piloted at Yale New Haven Hospital and Saint Francis Health System. April Koh (YC ’16) is the startup’s CEO.
Check out the video from YEI Demo Day here.
