CICS Students Win First, Second, and Third Place in the Berthiaume Center for Entrepreneurship’s Innovation Challenge
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Students from the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) earned top honors in the Berthiaume Center for Entrepreneurship’s 2025 Innovation Challenge, securing first, second, and third places and a portion of the $65,000 prize pool during the final round of the competition on April 24.
Max Loper ’25 and Rishi Nandurbarkar ’25, as part of the Diel Technologies team, claimed first place; Haamed Rahman ’27 earned second place with his digital health app, PlateMate; and Arman Agarwal ’24, along with partner Samyak Choudhary of the Isenberg School of Management, took third place for OffCampusSpaces.com, a platform simplifying student housing searches.
In first place, Diel Technologies was awarded $35,000 in support of their efforts to optimize energy harvesting from movement, allowing wearable devices to partially charge themselves as the user moves. The group will utilize a compact, efficient motor paired with their custom software to enable wearable tech to partially charge themselves. The team plans to use their winnings from the competition to patent their technology and product, and to license them to wearable technology companies pursuing sustainable energy solutions.
“The Innovation Challenge provided us with the experience of being able to talk and connect to experts in the field of entrepreneurship,” says Nandurbarkar, who worked with Ben Hyjek ’25 and Flo Sabatini ’25 from the College of Engineering. “It gave us key insights into how to turn our technical solution into a promising venture. It means the world to us that our solution, that started as a conversation over dinner a few years ago, has blossomed into a product that aims to solve a problem faced by many wearable tech companies.”
Second place winner Haamed Rahman received $15,000 for PlateMate, an AI-driven app that estimates calorie and nutritional content from photos of food, equipping users with a tool for informed, healthier eating choices by integrating food detection, segmentation, and nutritional databases.
“PlateMate started as something deeply personal: in high school, I used to weigh every meal to stay healthy, but once I got to college, I found it hard to keep that up,” explains Rahman. “I realized how tough it is to maintain good habits without support. PlateMate is something I built for myself, my family, and my friends, but I know it can help so many others. It’s meant to take the guesswork out of eating well without relying on fad diets, expensive nutritionists, or rigid programs. Plus, PlateMate goes beyond just calorie estimation; some of the core features include personalized health ratings and meal suggestions generated by scanning what’s in your pantry.”
He says placing second was “both validating and motivating.” Rahman plans to use the funding to scale up operations, from feature testing and infrastructure upgrades to beta testing and app store deployment. “My next step is to launch, gather real user feedback, and keep building,” he says, with hopes of PlateMate growing into a leading health app, standing alongside industry giants while incorporating a “fresh and accessible approach.”
Recent CICS graduate Arman Agarwal and co-founder Samyak Choudhary ‘25 of the Isenberg School of Management received third place and $10,000 for OffCampusSpaces.com, a platform aimed at simplifying the search for student housing across the country. Currently available at over 5,600 schools, the venture offers students an intuitive way to find roommates, sublets, and rentals, making off-campus living more accessible. The platform allows prospective renters to search for housing opportunities by college or university, presenting information about rent, amenities, utilities, deposits, move-in and out dates, and commute to campus all in one convenient place; it also has the option for users to list their rental properties.
“Student housing is a big problem that my friends, my co-founder, and every college student we have talked to has faced,” explains Agarwal. “We simply wanted to change that.”
Argawal and Choudhary intend to use the funding to build a stronger team at OffCampusSpaces.com, improve their algorithms, integrate AI for better personalization, and get user feedback to build better iterations: “We’re just getting started,” says Agarwal.
Held annually each spring, the Innovation Challenge is the Berthiaume Center’s premier pitch event in which entrepreneurial UMass students and graduates from the last decade compete for the chance to win equity-free funding to kickstart their business idea. Startups work closely with the Berthiaume Center team to create a polished pitch deck, present their startup plan to a panel of esteemed judges, and compete for a spot in the Innovation Challenge Final. Startups pitch to a panel of judges and a live audience.