Four Yale-affiliated companies honored for their high potential

Companies founded by Yale students or faculty members won four of the eight Innovation Pipeline Awards presented by the Connecticut Technology Council this year.

Companies founded by Yale students or faculty members won four of the eight Innovation Pipeline Awards presented by the Connecticut Technology Council this year.

The awards, which honor early-stage and emerging technology companies in Connecticut that have the highest potential to be successful enterprises, were presented at a ceremony held on Sept. 30 at the Omni Hotel in New Haven. Winners were selected from a pool of more than 400 entrepreneurs, investors and service providers.

The winning Yale-affiliated companies were Tutor Trove LLC, HadoopDB, NovaTract Surgical LLC and SilviaTerra,

TutorTrove, founded by Eli Luberoff ‘08, was honored as the Most Promising Technology Product or Service of the Year for its software that connects students and tutors around the country.

HadoopDB, which provides enterprises with parallel DBMS and analytic performance of a relational database, was named co-winner of the Most Promising Sofware Product of the Year (along with PowerPhone, Inc.) HadoopDB also shared the prize for best “elevator pitch.” The company was founded by graduate student Azza Abouzied, Justin Borgman (SOM ‘11), Kamil Bajda-Pawlikowski, and Yale faculty members Daniel J. Abadi and Avi Silberschatz.

NovaTract Surgical LLC, a company that develops new medical devices for the growing fields of laparoscopic and endoscopic surgery, took honors as the Most Promising Life Sciences Company. Its founders are Dr. Kurt Roberts of the Yale School of Medicine and Eleanor Tandler.

The Most Promising New Green Tech Company honor went to SilviaTerra, a company that uses algorithmic calculations to estimate the amount of trees in a given forest area. The company was founded by Zack Parisa, a 2009 graduate of the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (F&ES), Professor Chad Oliver of FE&S and Max Uhlenhuth ‘12.

Of these companies, three — Tutor Trove, HadoopDB and Silvia Terra — were founded with the support of the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute. In addition, HadoopDB, Silvia Terra and NovaTract are based upon inventions licensed from Yale.

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