Boilermakers shoot for the moon with innovative solutions during Moonshot Pitch Challenge

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Four teams of Purdue University students won a combined $5,500 from Purdue Innovates Incubator during the finals of the Moonshot Pitch Challenge, a semiannual ideation-focused competition.

Fifteen finalist teams had two minutes to pitch their solutions to judges. Winning teams ideated solutions that address challenges to building safety, interactive devices, oyster farming and space travel.

Active Purdue undergraduate and graduate students were eligible to compete. More than 45 teams submitted a two-minute video to explain the problem they were addressing and to propose their solution. Solutions were grouped into one of three categories:

• Earth: Ideas primarily focused on addressing social needs and challenges
• Orbit: Ideas primarily focused on business-to-business solutions
• Moonshot: Ideas primarily focused on solving a seemingly impossible problem

“The Moonshot Pitch Challenge is about ideating bold, audacious solutions to address worldwide challenges,” said Doug Applegate, Incubator associate director. “Purdue students are proving their ability to think critically about problems and then take the next giant leaps to solve them.”

Submissions for the fall 2026 Moonshot Pitch Challenge will be solicited in September.

Winning teams

First-place teams in each category received $1,500 apiece. Teams that won the Best Pitch and Crowd Favorite awards received $500 each. The winners were:

Earth category: AeroInspect. AeroInspect is an autonomous drone platform that uses lidar, imaging and machine learning models to evaluate building conditions, classify crack severity and provide actionable safety guidance to residents.

Team members are Alaqmar Bohori and Kanishk Israni, both in the College of Engineering. Bohori said the award will help the team build and train its machine learning model.

“This is the most crucial part of our idea,” he said. “The model will help us guide the drone autonomously and identify and classify structural issues, generating an automated building health report for our customers.”

Israni said the Incubator team that leads the Moonshot Pitch Challenge helped AeroInspect fine-tune its idea by balancing technical feasibility with real-world impact.

“Moonshot also connected us with other company representatives and judges, helping us expand our network and opening doors to get help with moving our startup forward,” he said.

Orbit category: PlugNPlay. PlugNPlay is a hardware platform that turns inert 3D prints into smart, interactive devices. Its proprietary “smart skin” technology allows users to plug modular electronics like sensors, lights and inputs directly into surfaces.

Alexander Kutulas, a student in the College of Science and Certificate in Entrepreneurship and Innovation program, created PlugNPlay, which is in an early-to-mid-prototyping stage. He said the award will propel research and development.

“We plan on exploring various solutions to maximize flexibility and modularity, while collaborating with our new connections at Purdue Research Foundation to explore manufacturing possibilities,” he said.

Kutulas had pitched other ideas to the Moonshot Pitch Challenge, which strengthened his skills at conducting market research and balancing technical information into a pitch.

“My various experiences with Moonshot have taught me so much about how to create pitch decks and how to present ideas within a short time frame, as well as led to valuable connections that I still have to this day,” he said.

Moonshot category: Electrocean Inc. Electrocean is building oyster farming technology that fortifies oysters against mass mortality, quickens their growth, and captures carbon dioxide to fight ocean acidification and climate change.

Team members are Gabriel Boyd, College of Engineering; Faith Qin, Stanford University; and Jason Qin, University of California, Berkeley. Boyd said the award will help Electrocean improve its demonstration prototype based on user feedback.

“We will be introducing our technology to end users soon and need to be able to fund their recommended modifications,” he said. “Doing this will enable us to ship a product for the 2026 oyster growing season that is tailored to our farmer end users.”

Boyd said the Moonshot Pitch Challenge has been useful in strengthening the effectiveness of the company’s two-minute pitch about its mission.

“We will be pitching in other competitions such as the Global Sustainability Challenge, and participating in Moonshot has encouraged us to workshop our pitch so it can be successful in those endeavors, too,” he said.

Best Pitch and Crowd Favorite Award: Adamant Aerospace. Increasing space travel frequency demands reusable technology. Adamant Aerospace’s Monolithic Diamond Throat Inserts conduct heat five times better than alloys. Solving brittleness eliminates erosion, which drastically reduces rebuild costs and enables consistent launches.

John Chang, a student in the College of Engineering and Certificate in Entrepreneurship and Innovation program, created Adamant Aerospace. He said the awards will go toward travel expenses to attend other conferences to network with industry professionals.

“I also am in discussion with subject matter experts and Purdue professors who have a background in rocket propulsion technology,” he said.

Chang said participating in the Moonshot program challenged him to concisely formulate a pitch deck and presentation lasting only two minutes.

“I certainly have grown as a result of participating in Moonshot,” he said. “It made me use skills I’ve developed in my classes to express ideas formally and conduct the proper market research to put myself out there.”

Honor roll of finalists and judges

Other Moonshot Pitch Challenge finalist teams were:

• Aerial Field Diagnostic. Aerial Field Diagnostic is a drone linked with Quantum Geographic information System and detection sensors that flies over a field to scan for pests and create heat maps with GPS coordinates of each abnormality. Immediately after the maps are created, a sprayer drone treats the affected areas, improving upon the speed of traditional methods. Nash Cheslock, College of Agriculture, Certificate in Entrepreneurship and Innovation.
• Alchemair Water Systems Ltd. Alchemair Water Systems Ltd. generates drinkable water from the water vapor in air. Current atmospheric water generators are high cost and energy inefficient. Alchemair Water improves upon them by using dehumidification membranes. Ishan Nair, College of Engineering.
• Bring the Focus to Us. Bring the Focus to Us is a hat that tracks brain state and provides instant vocal and visual adaptive feedback to keep users focused. It is designed for doomscrolling addicts and people with short attention spans to help them focus on what matters without distraction. Alzahraa Ahmed, College of Engineering.
• Climbr. Climbr gamifies focus using the myth of Sisyphus. If users leave the app, their boulder rolls to the bottom of a hill. Climbr allows users to invite friends to focus together in the same session, encouraging physical study groups and social accountability. Alexandru Lamba, College of Science, Certificate in Entrepreneurship and Innovation.
• CommonGround. CommonGround is a platform that closes equity gaps in urban planning by contacting affected residents directly via text or voice in their preferred language. This ensures renters, elders and nondigital users shape the decisions that impact them. Narain Bala, College of Engineering.
• Credit Crouton. Credit Crouton helps people answer a simple question: “What is the best credit card for me?” Russell Boyer, College of Engineering, Certificate in Entrepreneurship and Innovation.
• Ember. Ember is a personalized wellness and companion robot that addresses loneliness. It learns context and offers proactive conversations, reminders and human presence through loved ones’ voices, helping people feel safe, valued and connected. Abishek Girish, College of Engineering; Rajkumar Karthikeyan, Mitch Daniels School of Business.
• PoliStock. Everyday investors lose money reacting late to market events while hedge funds trade instantly. PoliStock closes this gap with AI that monitors earnings, politics and press to execute natural language event-based trades via a user’s brokerage. Aryan Kiran Chamarajanagar, Mahit Mehta and Aditya Pachpande, College of Science, Certificate in Entrepreneurship and Innovation; Nivan Gujral, College of Science.
• VacSaver. VacSaver is an active refrigeration system for the last legs of vaccine transportation. Rutvik Mehenge, College of Engineering.
• VaporLoop. VaporLoop is a portable, leasable cooling module designed to reduce waste and energy consumption in data centers. It makes sustainable data center cooling affordable and scalable. Ali Almutawa, College of Science; Anas Rafei, College of Engineering.
• Vision Assist. Vision Assist uses smart glasses and a lidar-enabled cane to expand spatial awareness for people with visual impairments. The system recognizes people and objects, maps surroundings beyond arm’s reach, and delivers real-time audio guidance for safe navigation. Muhammad Zohaib Ali and Aditya Hebbani, College of Engineering.

Judges for the Moonshot Pitch Challenge finals were Toph Day, Elevate Ventures; Larry Fultz, Purdue University Indiana Manufacturing Competitiveness Center; Rachel Rizzuto, GadellNet Consulting Services; Josh Thiel, Fourth Offset; and Lucas Woody, Purdue University Certificate in Entrepreneurship and Innovation.

About Purdue Innovates Incubator

Purdue Innovates Incubator is the front door to the rich ecosystem of programs and services designed to help early-stage startups take their next step. Programs provide settings for cohort work and one-on-one consultations. Content includes clarifying problems from the customer’s perspective, developing a business model, conducting customer discovery interviews, team building, determining regulatory pathways and legal structures, and more. Purdue alumni and community members interested in becoming mentors are invited to contact the Incubator team.

About Purdue University

Purdue University is a public research university leading with excellence at scale. Ranked among top 10 public universities in the United States, Purdue discovers, disseminates and deploys knowledge with a quality and at a scale second to none. More than 106,000 students study at Purdue across multiple campuses, locations and modalities, including more than 57,000 at our main campus in West Lafayette and Indianapolis. Committed to affordability and accessibility, Purdue’s main campus has frozen tuition 14 years in a row. See how Purdue never stops in the persistent pursuit of the next giant leap — including its integrated, comprehensive Indianapolis urban expansion; the Mitch Daniels School of Business; Purdue Computes; and the One Health initiative — at https://www.purdue.edu/president/strategic-initiatives.