In celebration of Global Entrepreneurship Week, we’re highlighting five startups with a Mac Eng connection.
The Start-up: Universole Fit
The Mac Eng Connection: Co-founded by Joshua McGillivray, biomedical engineering grad and master’s student and Aqeel Awadia and Daniel Shields, engineering graduates.
Why they’ll make you proud:
At the recent Startup Survivor Pitch Competition hosted by The Forge, Universole Fit went home with two awards. Universole Fit received first place, as well as People’s Choice.
If you’ve ever struggled with ordering shoes online, McGillivray’s invention is here to help. Using ground-breaking 3D shoe modeling and a proprietary AI algorithm, Universole Fit finds the ideal foot and shoe match based on retailer specific stock. This ensures the shoe you buy fits and reduces the number of returns a retailer must manage.
The Start-up: Taco
The Mac Eng Connection: Afeef Khan, Eden Lazar, Caitlyn Kuzler and Clayton MacNeil, mechanical engineering graduates, invented the device
Why they’ll make you proud:
Winning the National James Dyson Award is one reason. They also help people with mobility issues cook with greater confidence.
Their invention, Taco, is a knife guide designed to improve the lives of people suffering from Parkinson’s disease, hand tremors or other mobility issues. It was created as a group project in a product design class.
“Thanks to a team effort, we were able to take a decent idea and keep upgrading it into something that ultimately had a real-world effect,” said Lazar.
The Start-up: Jetson Infinity
The Mac Eng Connection: President is Engineering Physics and Mangement grad Michael Jobity
Why they’ll make you proud:
Jetson Infinity arms coders, from beginners to experts, with solutions to futuristic problems.
“Essentially, it’s a general purpose robotic arm that can be used for a multitude of different applications,” says Jobity. “You basically plug it into your laptop, and then you’re good to go.”
Jobity also credits his time at McMaster for the business skills he acquired, especially from The Forge.
The primary goal of Jetson Infinity’s robotic arm is to give students a tool that will reduce barriers to the world of tech.
The Start-up: Polyformer
The Mac Eng Connection: Co-created by Swaleh Owais, mechanical engineering graduate
Why they’ll make you proud:
They are another James Dyson Award winning team this year with the Global Sustainability award for Polyformer.
Polyformer is a financially and environmentally sustainable solution for communities around the globe who are tackling issues of plastic waste, accessibility and production.
The innovation is an open-source community project with the CAD, code, and building instructions available for free online. Anyone can build the machine and then use it to cut plastic bottles into a long continuous string. Then, feeding the string into the machine spools it into a 3D printer filament.
“We’re actually moving forward with our plans to deploy Polyformer at other maker spaces around the world because if 3D printing is cheap, it’s more accessible and that means more people can build amazing things,” says Owais.
The Start-up: AXIBO
The Mac Eng Connection: Founders Anoop Gadhrri and Sohaib Al-Emara, electrical engineering graduates and and Reiner Schmidt, BTech graduate, developed it during their studies.
Why they’ll make you proud:
AIXIBO is a robotic system that automates various operations with a camera. It acts as personal camera assistant, automating the tedious aspects of video production and it’s already being used by Netflix and Apple.
