Columbia Venture Competition Cites SIPA Alumnus as Entrepreneur of the Year, Highlights Winner of Public Policy Challenge
At a recent event celebrating the tenth annual Columbia Venture Competition, SIPA alumnus Frank Reig MPA-ESP ’13 was honored as Columbia’s Entrepreneur of the Year, while student winners of challenges hosted by SIPA and other University schools took the stage to share brief pitches about their projects with an audience of faculty, alumni, and peers.
As co-founder and CEO of Revel, Reig is a leading innovator in improving electronic vehicle access in cities. His company aims to electrify cities through charging hubs, all-electric rideshare, mopeds, and e-bikes.
Reig underscored how SIPA inspired him in comments recorded last fall: “Policy matters,” he said. “How you speak and how you develop and build a relationship with regulators and politicians matters. These are soft things that I think a lot of folks in the startup world don’t give enough attention to.”
The April 14 event also highlighted the winner of this year’s SIPA Public Policy Challenge — a team of SIPA students comprising Gudfinnur Sveinsson MPA ’23, Theophile Pouget-Abadie MPA ’23, and Dylan Malloy MIA ’24. They won a $20,000 grant for Brineworks, which aims to remove massive amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide and usher in a new era of sustainable raw material production from seawater.
Sveinsson told SIPA News he will use the award money to invest in setting up a business and purchasing the initial equipment to develop their process. Joseph T. Perryman, a chemical engineer who advised the team, has joined the effort as a cofounder.
“The faculty were very helpful in helping me make meaningful connections to people in relevant industries,” Sveinsson said, “and also to start asking tough questions in the early stages.”
The winner of this year’s SIPA Public Policy Challenge, Brineworks aims to remove massive amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide and usher in a new era of sustainable raw material production from seawater.
The Columbia Venture Competition sponsors six challenges all told — some in partnership with individual schools — in which alumni judges evaluate innovative business or policy proposals related to specific topics. Because it is intended first for SIPA students, the SIPA Public Policy Challenge requires that participating teams include one or more current students in substantive roles.
But SIPA students and even alumni can also participate in some of the five other challenges; those who did so found success this year. Luis Gustavo Perez Fakhouri MPA ’22, for example, received first prize in the Brown Institute Innovation Challenge in Journalism, Media, and Technology. He was recognized (with Felipe Bailez) for Palver, a platform that monitors public sentiment on WhatsApp and Telegram as a way to combat misinformation and fake news.
And alumnus Eitzaz Shah MIA ’21 placed second in both the Columbia-CareOne Healthcare Innovation Challenge and the StartUp Columbia Challenge. His project, Ophy Care, is a digital health infrastructure company that provides cloud-based health record management and telehealth infrastructure to healthcare organizations serving underserved populations.
Hosted by Columbia Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Design since 2013, the Columbia Venture Competition seeks to spark innovation on key issue areas while encouraging cross-school collaboration. Through multiple rounds of judges, teams compete to create the most innovative solution to a problem. In the final round of each, winning teams are selected in each category, with finalists receiving a cash prize to invest in their new innovations.