Eller’s 2021 New Venture Competition Winners Create Hybrid Robots

May 25, 2021

Every year, students at the University of Arizona have the opportunity to join the McGuire Center New Venture Development Program (NVD), which allows aspiring entrepreneurs to come together in teams and work on developing a venture of their own from scratch.

As part of the NVD, students can participate in the New Venture Competition, where they compete with their fellow classmates and introduce their inventions to a panel of judges.

Teams that place first through third get a cash prize of $5,000, $3,000 and $2,500 respectively.

The 2021 winners are Collin Taylor ’21 BSBA (Finance/Entrepreneurship) and Sahand Sabet ’21 PhD (Mechanical Engineering) with their venture Revolute Robotics—a hybrid robot that has the capacity to both roll on the floor and fly, helping commercial farms minimize wasted resources, maximize production output and reduce costly, inefficient labor expenses.

“The nice thing about McGuire is that you get the opportunity to really go all in,” says Taylor. “We had so many mentors that went out of their way to help us through the process and gave us so many tools to build a strong foundation for our business.”

Taylor and Sabet were featured in a May 21 video released by the University of Arizona Tech Core where they explain how their venture works and why they decided to take on the create this robot.

Looking to the future of their venture, Taylor and Sabet are now hoping to find support from the community to take Revolute Robotics to the next level.

Second place winners are Olivia Lai ’21 BSBA (Marketing/Entrepreneurship), Megan Biesterfeld ’21 BSBA (Finance), Dani Neuberger ’21 BBA (Marketing) and Cody Hutchison ’21 BSBA (Finance/Marketing/Entrepreneurship) with their venture SoulScope, an app that will connect people to self-improvement resources such as books and podcasts. Third place went to Grant Musil ’20 BBA (Finance), Caleb Piti ’21 BBA (Finance/Entrepreneurship), Samantha Heward ’21 (Applied Biosciences) and Nicholas Lange ’22 MBA, with their invention Rethink Fresh, which provides fresh, healthy, local produce.