Pear Competition: Harvard Winners

At Pear, we have a long history partnering with students to build the next wave of category-defining companies. In fact, we started working with the founders of companies like Branch, Aurora Solar, Bioage, and Affinity when they were still students.  Each year, we host Pear Competition where students can receive up to $100,000 to launch their startups.  

This year, there were five winners of Pear Competition at Harvard, and they received prizes between $25,000 and $100,000 each. These winners were selected based on their ideas across various fields from AI infrastructure to virtual reality and more. We’re excited to shine a spotlight on this year’s winners:

Civic Roundtable 

Civic Roundtable is a collaboration platform for public servants: a “Reddit meets LinkedIn”– designed with and for public servants. Founders Madeleine Smith and Austin Boral are joint Harvard Business School / Harvard Kennedy School of Government student with experience working in and with the public sector, where they saw firsthand the inefficiencies that state, local, and federal workers face in their attempts to collaborate. Civic Roundtable brings these workers together in one place to share knowledge and coordinate their joint efforts. 

Gigit.ai

Gigit.ai was founded by Harvard Business School student Inez Wihardjo, is a plug-and-play infrastructure to enable enterprises to own and train specialized AI models. Unlike existing players, Gigit offers an integrated self-hosted system of AI + subject-matter experts to ensure no hallucination, utmost accuracy, while preserving the data privacy of the enterprises.

Delilah

Delilah is a personalized AI assistant founded by Harvard College undergraduates Khoi Nguyen and Raunak Daga, two members of Pear Garage at Harvard. Khoi and Raunak are hackers at heart, and have built and battle-tested a suite of productivity tools with their target market of GenZ students. We couldn’t be more excited to support their mission to bring the game-changing tools of an all-purpose AI assistant to this demographic. 

BuyXR

BuyXR, founded by Harvard College undergraduates Sam Suchin and Will Schrepferman, is a virtual reality e-commerce platform that allows any seller – from the world’s biggest brands to limited edition creators – to offer their merchandise in an immersive, gamified world. 

Stealth 

More to come about our fifth winner when they launch! 

We’ve long believed that, with the right tools and resources, student builders can build extraordinary companies. These five Harvard Competition winners embody the spirit of student entrepreneurship and innovation, and we’re excited to see where they go!