Grainger Winners Set Focus on $1 Million Hult Prize
The Illinois Tech student winners of the fourth annual Grainger Computing Innovation Prize have a chance at earning the $1 million Hult Prize after being invited to pitch their VigilAI business at the international startup competition.
The team will go to Boston to participate at the national competition, with winners there heading to London to compete for the grand prize. Utkarsh Nanda (M.S. CS 2nd Year), CEO/chief technical officer of VigilAI, says the team always envisioned developing VigilAI as a startup business, and taking part in the Hult Prize competition will help.
“I was delighted to hear the news,” Nanda says. “I told our [chief financial officer] first about the achievement. Our team was about to meet at [Ed Kaplan Family Institute for Innovation and Tech Entrepreneurship] with a few officials from the Cook County State Attorney’s Office for piloting our system.”
VigilAl was developed as a real-time crime detection system that processes multiple closed-circuit television feeds in real-time to detect crimes, anomalies, and threats. By leveraging refined pattern recognition and minimizing false alarms, VigilAl transforms passive cameras into proactive surveillance systems, delivering rapid alerts that are enriched with historical context. It leverages advanced cloud-based processing, real-time analytics, and multi-camera integration to deliver a deeper, nuanced understanding of threats. The team has two patents pending for its technology.
Nanda, as well as VigilAI COO Utsav Pathak (M.S. CS 2nd Year), say they have found great resources at Illinois Tech to launch a startup. Coursework in data structure and algorithms, natural language processing, and advanced artificial intelligence helped bring VigilAI to development. And help from faculty and staff at the Kaplan Institute helped them build a business model.
“One other biggest challenge was finding the right set of mentors and resources,” Pathak says. “We found them through the Grainger Prize and at Kaplan’s Startup Accelerator program.”
Studying at a tech-focused university in a tech hub that incubates startups also helped.
“The flexibility that I got by choosing coursework from the business school and finance while doing my master’s in computer science gave me a much larger perspective while still focusing on a tech degree,” Pathak says. “I would also say that socially interacting in Â鶹APP’s ecosystem of startups, such as attending events from P33 and TechSummit, has helped me understand the industrial side.”
The team hopes to find more resources while attending the Hult Prize nationals in Boston.
“There’ll be great talent coming from around the globe and finding the right set of enthusiastic and rugged individuals is always tough,” Nanda says. “Besides the networking opportunity and learning from mentors, I think the recognition of winning Hult Prize will open lot of doors for us.”
By receiving the $15,000 top prize at the Grainger Prize in November 2024 not only gave the team the resources it needs to continue the development of VigilAI, but it also put a spotlight on the project.
“The recognition opened doors for us when having conversation with our advisers and industry leaders,” Nanda says. “It’s definitely a great platform to highlight ideas that students are coming up with.”
Nijgururaj Ashtagi (M.A.S. CS 2nd Year) and Varn Tejas (ITM 4th Year), as well as Gaurav Mourya from Oracle, are also part of the VigilAI team.
Photo: VigilAI team (from left to right) Utkarsh Nanda, Brittany Shepherd, and Utsav Pathak who earned first place in the Grainger Innovation Computing Prize competition.
