Fletcher students and alumni received rent credits and support for creative arts endeavor
The Tufts New Ventures Competition offers the opportunity for teams led by students, faculty, staff, and recent alumni to pitch exciting ventures in one of three tracks: General, Social Impact, and Healthcare & Life Science. The flagship competition supports innovative projects in these categories through prizes and awards valued at over $250,000. Judges evaluate teams on their problem, solution, market strategy, sustainability, impact, team fit, presentation, and additional impressions.
This year, the Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts hosted the competition on April 10. Fifteen finalists pitched their ventures to a live panel of judges and an audience of friends, family, and faculty. Two groups of Fletcher students and one pair of alumni received funding for their pitches.
Eshani Chakrabarti, F26, and Jean Jiang, F23 won the $2,500 Creative Arts Prize for their project, Grandparents of Boston.
Ryan Friedman, F25, Anjalique Knight, A19, Rachel Friedman, Niam Lakhani, A27, and Jaime Prater won a Cummings Award—Lease Credit for their project, Practices and Perspectives. The Cummings Award offers winners one year of office space, valued at $25,000.
Veeradittya Podder, F26, Ashley Lo, F26, and Herbert Chang placed second in the General Track, earning a prize of $10,000, for their project SHINRI Analytics. The team also won a Cummings Award.
Fletcher participants reflected upon the experience and shared more about the value of their ventures.
Grandparents of Boston Wins Creative Arts Prize
Grandparents of Boston aims to present a portrait of Massachusetts through intergenerational stories from communities across the Commonwealth. The Creative Arts Prize awards $2,500 annually to support the advancement of creative and artistic entrepreneurship at Tufts. Projects awarded this prize prioritize a balance of business and artistic innovation.
“Grandparents of Boston grew out of an idea I first explored at Fletcher while studying public diplomacy and American soft power. In Ambassador Don Heflin’s Diplomatic Tradecraft course, I proposed an American Grandparents Museum as a cultural diplomacy initiative, and later expanded on the concept in my capstone, Reimagining American Soft Power, advised by Lawrence Quartana. The idea was rooted in the question: how might we tell the American story through the memories, traditions, and wisdom of our collective grandparents? What began as a public diplomacy concept at Fletcher found unexpected homes across the university.
"Conversations with a former classmate from Fletcher, Jean Jiang, helped me see how a cultural diplomacy project could be approached through an entrepreneurial lens. Before Fletcher, my background was in radio and documentary filmmaking, while Jean came from consulting and a dual-degree business program, which reflected the interdisciplinary nature of Fletcher. It deepened my understanding of how global problems can be approached through creative solutions across disciplines. The support of the Derby Entrepreneurship Center and SMFA was especially meaningful, as it felt like an endorsement of an idea that had been evolving throughout my time at Fletcher.”
– Eshani Chakrabarti, F25
Shinri Analytics Earns Cummings Award—Lease Credit and Places Second in the General Track
Shinri Analytics is a predictive intelligence platform working to assist small and midsize asset managers in evaluating multiple assets in the face of geopolitical turmoil. It uses a prediction engine and scenario generator to anticipate how geopolitical events will affect specific assets and streamline trade practices.
The team placed second in the General Track and received the Cummings Award. The General Track welcomes entries across industry sectors and has supported projects ranging from B2C, B2B, consumer products, tough tech ventures and more. The second place winner in the General Track is awarded $10,000. The Cummings Award—Lease Credit offers winning teams a free office space for one year, valued at $25,000.
“Over the past year, geopolitics has become the primary concern for many businesses. This became even more clear through conversations with my professors and Fletcher Alumni. At the same time, systemic tools to evaluate business exposure to geopolitics were largely missing. We saw that as an opportunity. Shinri helps quantify geopolitical risk for insurance, banking, and asset management. We detect insider trading and convert raw video, social media, and news into structured sentiment signals to flag geopolitical and macro risks early for our clients.”
– Veeradittya Podder, F26
Finalist Syren System Explores Potential for Undersea Drones
Christopher Giraldi, F27, Christopher Ghantous, E26, and Michael Giraldi were finalists for their project Syren System, which is dedicated to creating customizable, modular, and affordable undersea drones that will allow ocean explorers across experience levels access to the underwater frontier.
“With changes in digital technology, notably AI, we anticipate a wave of transformation and applications for underwater autonomy. I believe that what digital applications on iPhone did for digital tech, the new fusion of physical hardware engineering and artificial intelligence will do for the physical world. We are truly on the cusp of the robot age; it will take creative entrepreneurs and engineers to develop the best tool kits to solve the challenges we face today at a global scale.
"A key feature of the New Ventures Competition is that you only have five minutes to make your pitch. In that time, you need to make it clear what the problem is, why this solution is best, and why this team is the right one to do it. Doing this in five minutes really requires you to clarify the mission to an audience that more likely than not has little to no expertise in the particular field. How then do you distill the hundreds to thousands of hours of learning, research and development, and analysis into just a few dozen seconds? I discovered that the best way to do this was with an interactive story, and taking the judging panel and audience on a walk together towards the future.”
—Christopher Giraldi, F27
Read more about experiential learning at Fletcher.