Cal Hacks Fellowship 5.0 Teams: Part 1
Cal Hacks Fellowship is a 12-week idea accelerator program for some of the most promising ideas from Cal Hacks’s fall hackathon. Our goal is to help hackers take their ideas beyond the hackathon, to help grow them into startups, nonprofit ventures, and successful side projects. This year, we worked with 10 of the top teams from Cal Hacks 5.0. Here is a glimpse at some of our teams that you’ll hear from at our Fellowship Demo Day.
BeyondVision.ai
Turn aerial imagery into actionable insights.
In a $13 billion and growing market for commercial drones, a majority of value is linked to drone services and data analysis. Beyond Vision enables drone pilots and firms to easily and quickly process the collected data, increase accuracy, and derive actionable insights from their flights. Given a handful of images, their artificial intelligence technology currently analyzes and provides detailed reports for construction and mining operations by identifying key components of interest. They are also working with utilities to help detect faulty equipment in an effort to combat recurring wildfires in California. Founders Ankit Bansal and Chintan Vyas aim to truly unlock the power of computer vision and drone analytics in a simple, intuitive package for companies around the world.
DeWaste
Reduce food waste by using data like never before.
Across U.S. Colleges, 22 million pounds of food are wasted every year. DeWaste aims to tackle this by providing dining halls insight on students’ preferences with image analysis technology. By mounting cameras on racks where plates are returned, DeWaste analyses the food and gives dining halls recommendations on how to improve their offerings. Founders Paran Sonthalia and Pranshu Bansal have already begun testing on campus with the goal to significantly reduce food waste and improve offerings in dining halls.
Dyslexica
The e-reader for the dyslexic.
For the three million people who are diagnosed with dyslexia every year, readability is truly an issue that is not being tackled comprehensively. Dyslexica is building a mobile app that empowers users through customization, allowing users to translate fonts, adjust line and character-spacing, providing diagnostic preference tests, enabling text-to-speech, and other helpful features. Founders Timothy Fan and Amarinder Chahal hope that one day all people with dyslexia can look at their peers and not feel any different.
UCharify
Connecting donors to charities.
There are over 1.5 million charities in the United States alone; however, some donors still find it difficult to find the right charities for them. UCharify is a web platform that allows donors to make an impact at multiple charities with ease and see what their money is being used for. Founders Arjun Patel, Amal Bhatnagar, and Rodrigo Palmaka are creating this product for highly active smaller charities who lack a digital presence and want to stay connected with their donors for long term impact.
Hermes
Safety in numbers.
With an average of 14.93 crimes occurring each day in Berkeley alone, student safety is an urgent priority. Despite this, no comprehensive and widespread solutions exist. Existing solutions face critical issues such as user endangerment and low adoption rates. Hermes tackles these issues by pairing students who are walking alone at night using custom routing and dynamic path-monitoring algorithms. As Cal undergrads themselves, founders Julia Maimone, Maggie Donaldson, Ben Goldberg, and Sharabesh Ramesh want to empower students with the tools to stay in control of their own safety.
If you’d like to get in touch with any of our companies, feel free to reach out to me at deevy@calhacks.io and I can set up an introduction.
See this story to learn more about Fellowship and previous teams, and the Cal Hacks website to learn more about our organization!
