Dropllel awarded top prize at 2023 Tiger Cage Business Pitch Competition

A competition among 16 Auburn University student-led business startups came to conclusion on March 31 when the four teams who advanced to the final round of the 2023 Tiger Cage Business Pitch Competition presented their business plans to industry professional judges.  

After literally hundreds of hours of prep work by all four startups, when the judge’s deliberations ended, it was Dropplel that came out on top, receiving $25,000 in startup capital.

Led by Parvin Fathi-Hafshejani, a doctoral candidate in electrical engineering in Auburn’s Samuel Ginn College of Engineering, Dropllel is a diagnostic tool that provides accurate, rapid and cost-effective detection of viruses, thereby successfully lowering the possibility of large-scale spread.

“The Tiger Cage Pitch Competition has been an incredible experience for me,” said Fathi-Hafshejani. “As an engineer-turned-entrepreneur, with a strong technical background but relatively new to the business world, I gained critical business skills, such as developing a business model and market strategy, as well as improving my pitching skills.

“The competition helped me to think critically and connect with amazing entrepreneurs. Overall, it provided me with the skills, confidence and network I needed to succeed as an entrepreneur.”

Mark Forchette, a 1981 Auburn marketing alumnus and president and CEO of Delphinus Medical Technologies, opened the final round. He was the original driving force behind the creation of Tiger Cage, which has now completed its ninth year.

“Tiger Cage was a concept I floated in a Dean’s Advisory Council meeting in 2014 because I recognized through my Silicon Valley start-up experience that the skills you need as an entrepreneur are unique and require intense development,” said Forchette. “I felt it was essential to intensify our training for students on best-in-class entrepreneurial processes so they would be ready for the world they would compete in after graduation.” 

Forchette’s advice to young entrepreneurs is simple: “Define what you believe in and live by it. Create your playbook and live by it tenaciously. And when you get the chance, take big audacious swings. If you fail, so what. There is no failure you can’t recover from.”

Presented by the Harbert College of Business, the final four teams were given 15 minutes to pitch their ideas and 15 minutes for questions and answers.

To support their business plans, the 2023 Tiger Cage competition provided startup capital to all teams that placed in the final four, with two additional “special awards” being provided.

Second place, receiving $12,000 in startup capital, went to Rodopto, led by Scott Rowe from the Harbert College of Business. Rodopto is an agricultural company dedicated to sustainable crop production utilizing advancements in drone technology.  

“The best part of Tiger Cage and, by extension, the New Venture Accelerator and Harbert College of Business,” said Rowe, “has been all the people I have met along the way. I have learned an incredible amount from the other founders and startups as they face many of the same challenges.

“While Tiger Cage is ultimately a competition, a tremendous amount of teamwork and shared learning still occurs. Being able to tap into the expertise and practical experience of Entrepreneurs-in-Residence, like Jennifer Nay and Dan O’Keefe, has been hugely helpful in taking my back-of-the-napkin sketches and bringing them to market in a meaningful way. Tiger Cage is very much in keeping with Auburn’s traditions of growing as a community.”

Third place and $8,000 in startup capital went to OMNIS, led by Zakariya Veasy and Evan Henley from the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering. OMNIS is a peer-to-peer social platform that allows individuals to borrow money through the community with short-term, micro-loans that meet their immediate needs.

“Tiger Cage has pushed me in ways that has made my business better as a whole,” said Veasy. “You don’t know what you don’t know, and that is what presenting a business idea in Tiger Cage is all about.”

Fourth place and $5,000 in startup capital went to Archangel Defense, led by Shay Pilcher from the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering. Archangel Defense is a provider of customized equipment for any combat situation imaginable, designed for peak mission performance and, above all, to make sure everyone who defends our country makes it home.

“As an engineer, it’s often very difficult to articulate all the math and the engineering concepts of our projects into terms anyone could walk up and talk to you about,” said Pilcher. “Tiger Cage has helped me hone this skill tremendously and has shown me that effective communication of an idea is, more often than not, of greater importance than the idea itself.”

Dropllel also received the Thomas Walter Center for Technology Management award in the amount of $4,000 to be used for hardware/software prototyping.

OMNIS also received the Burr & Forman legal services in-kind award in the amount of $5,000.

“Looking back on the nine years of Tiger Cage, I am very proud of the fact that the competition has held true to the beliefs that Mark grounded us in at the beginning,” said Lou Bifano director of Auburn’s New Venture Accelerator. “We remain steadfast in achieving his goal of having a multi-faceted entrepreneurship approach that enhances our students’ skills in starting a new business venture, bringing forward a new project for approval in an existing company, developing students’ written and verbal communications skills and helping them build and grow their professional networks.”

Bifano said Forchette summed up the value proposition behind Tiger Cage perfectly when he quoted one of his mentors, Brooks Byers, who said, “If it’s just a competition, it will fail the entrepreneurs. It must develop best-in-class processes that support them in their journey. It must teach them how to do things to be ready for what’s ahead so they can cut through the clutter. It must penetrate the classroom and include experiences and mentorship by skilled leaders.’”

This year’s judges were:

Tim Denison – president, GDI
Ken Evola – managing director, PwC
Ben Finley – founder, The Finley Group
Dave Gray – founder, BISO Collective
Bria Johnson – chief people officer, TaxxWiz
Logan Loomis – founder, Logan Loomis Consulting
Mark Mettelman – founder, Triad Advisors
John Evans – professor, Auburn University Samuel Ginn College of Engineering
Ralph Runge – founder, R2 Consulting
Ron Schier – franchise owner, Yet Another Broken Egg
Danny Strickland – retired chief Innovation officer, Coke
Jason Wilson – founder, Back Forty Beer, CEO Coldwater Mountain Brewpub
Walt Woltosz – chairman and CEO, Simulations Plus

All 2023 Tiger Cage participants were:

Gym Rat U
Dropllel
Flavivirus Resource Center
Atlas Esports Consulting
Archangel Defense
RNA
Dropout Flags
Snake Pudding
Flight Foods
Rodopto
AbGlo
Hyper Transport
Dream Mentorship Academy
Bump
Menu Match
OMNIS

Contact Lou Bifano to learn about the 2024 Tiger Cage competition, as well as the broad array of services provided by the New Venture Accelerator that are available to help those looking to start a new business or grow an existing one.