AI innovation dominates 2025 UC LAUNCH Demo Day competition at Berkeley Haas

Startup founders who pitched technologies ranging from an AI-powered wearable vest designed to improve balance to prevent falls to a platform that improves how brands show up in AI searches were among the top winners at UC LAUNCH 2025 Demo Day, held Tuesday in Chou Hall’s Spieker Forum.

This year, the UC Launch program whittled 18 teams from across seven UC schools down to eight teams who pitched for a total of $60,000 in prize money before a panel of venture capital investors. Five of the 10 UCs were represented, and the top three Demo Day winners included Berkeley Haas students.

“There were a really good batch of fundable companies here today,” said Javelin Venture Partners Managing Director Jed Katz, MBA 96, who served as a Demo Day judge along with Amy Fan, MBA/MPH 19, a venture partner at Predictive VC; Kevin Chang, MBA 22, general partner at Berkeley Haas Ventures; and David Hehman, MBA 98, co-founder of Underdog Labs. Ruth Mbanali, MBA 25, and Pranathi Gompa, MBA 26, served as UC LAUNCH co-chairs of the sold-out event.

“This was an incredible year for startup talent,” said Rhonda Shrader, executive director of the Berkeley Haas Entrepreneurship Program (BHEP), which runs UC LAUNCH. “Every single team pivoted at least once, focusing on finding evidence of customer need instead of building out their vision. They all learned what it takes to build a viable, scalable startup—and how falling in love with a problem versus a product is the key to success. We’re grateful for their hard work and incredibly proud of their progress.”

Demo Day winners:

First place ($25,000): LoveIt AI, co-founded by Harry Jiang, BS 11 (electrical engineering and computer sciences), and EWMBA 26, and Tom Lee, MBA 14, is an AI platform that helps brands track and optimize how they appear across AI search engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity. LoveltAI helps customers track, measure, and improve their presence in AI-generated search answers. 

Second place ($15,000): FeatureBox AI, founded by Bharath Kurapati, EWMBA 26, is building technology for AI-driven inventory forecasting for small businesses for Shopify and beyond. The company aims to help brands reclaim lost revenue caused by poor inventory forecasting.

Third place/New Vision Holdings Award ($10,000): Anchor Logics, founded by CEO Nathan Hsu, BS/BA 24, (Robinson LSBE) and Joel An, BS 25, (Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering) is revolutionizing balance wearable technology through AI and engineering. Its first product, PIEZO, is a wearable smart vest for patients with balance disorders. Co-founder Joel An presented for Anchor Logics.

The Jacobs Ed Tech Award ($10,000): ABC’s of Emotions, co-founded by UC Berkeley alumna Akilah Reynolds and Shawn Lampkins, is an online learning company dedicated to helping children build emotional intelligence through engaging activities and games to make learning fun and easy.

Audience Choice Award: Axonara Biosciences, founded by Edward Fisher, BS 25, of UC San Diego, is creating point-of-care genetic diagnostics to prevent life-threatening drug interactions.  Fisher returned to UC LAUNCH after finishing second in 2023 for BioGenesis Trials as an undergraduate at UCSC. 

Pivoting early

Lee, who co-founded LoveIt AI 11 years after graduating from the MBA program, said the win came as a surprise. “I’m still digesting it all,” he said. “I’m very surprised that we won for a bunch of different reasons.” For one, Lee said that he and Jiang, who met at a startup mixer at Berkeley, had to pivot early because they realized that they weren’t solving a critical problem.

“We realized talking to more people that this previous idea just didn’t cut it,” he said. “It was a hard decision to pivot, and we spent two months churning through 13 different ideas. We came up with this idea about a month and a half ago. And from there to here, it was just a massive, massive sprint.”

Lee said they plan to use the prize money to finish building their minimum viable product (MVP) and launch with customers before they start fundraising.

Kurapati, founder of FeatureBox AI, said he knew the startup was tackling a real pain point for small- and mid-size companies when he started developing his business plan.

“The validation came through the thoughtful questions from the VC judges and audience,” he said. “That, more than the prize itself, reaffirmed we’re on the right path.”

This isn’t Kurapati’s first startup. His first venture, which shut down, led him to Haas in search of a strong entrepreneurial network and the right skillset, he said. Kurapati also previously worked as one of the first employees at Finless Foods, a Series B sustainable seafood startup that raised $35 million.

Jiang said he was thankful to the UC LAUNCH team for its work. “The staff and volunteers have been so amazing and so helpful,” he said. “Every single event has been so well organized, and they’ve put in so much work and effort. I’m super grateful.”

Sharing advice for aspiring entrepreneurs, Lee urged students to “do it now.”

“Speaking as someone who took 11 years to come back here, I learned a lot over the past 11 years, but sometimes you have to just jump,” he said. “Just do it.”