Pitch perfect! Four CSSE students advance to Tiger Cage finals

Four computer science and software engineering students representing two teams will compete in the Tiger Cage Student Business Pitch Competition finals, Auburn University’s premier student entrepreneurship event, on March 25.

Jesse Stewart, Brooke Hopton-Jones and Sydney Pham, representing Toft by 2153, and Emmett Deen, who partnered with business administration student Jacob Cordero, representing IGNTE, were among students from four teams selected to advance beyond the Feb. 25 semifinal round held inside the Broadway Event Space and Theater at Horton-Hardgrave Hall.

In its eighth year and sponsored by the Harbert College of Business, Tiger Cage provides students with business plan development opportunities from mentors and seasoned entrepreneurs, culminating in quarterfinal, semifinal and final rounds, where $54,000 in early-stage startup capital is at stake.

Toft by 2153 is a video game development studio specializing in next-generation, cross-platform, multi-player games. IGNTE is a platform that provides organizations with a means of showing the sponsor’s advertisements on Twitch.

Other engineering-related teams competing in Friday’s semifinals, but not advancing, were OMNIS (Zakariya Veasy, computer science and software engineering), a crowdsource banking platform where individuals earn money passively and actively through community and peer-to-peer, short-term micro-loans; and GoReceipt (Harrison Hall, industrial and systems engineering, and Will Murphy, finance and supply chain management), a digital receipt hardware/app product that allows the customer to tap their phone onto a platform at the point-of-sale, receive a digitized receipt and save it onto a cell phone app.

Engineering students have been part of six of the past seven Tiger Cage-winning teams. Ben Conry, '19 civil engineering, co-founded Flashtract with engineering alumnus Blair Chenault and was part of the 2019 Tiger Cage winning team. He credited the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering for preparing himself, his teammates, and all engineering students for entrepreneurship competitions.

“The College of Engineering does more than just teach you about engineering. It teaches you how to solve problems and think about things in kind of creative, innovative ways,” said Conry, one of seven industry professional judges working Friday’s semifinal round. “When I was in engineering, we had to write problem statements for many homework assignments. Then we had to develop solutions. It allowed us to take that framework and apply it to what we do on a day-to-day basis. We saw that from the engineering teams out there, and they applied it very well to their presentations.”

Non-engineering teams earning spots in the March 25 finale included: The Best Roping Dummy (Will Jordan, agricultural communications), a team roping training system that reduces the need for live cattle and improves practice capabilities; and Feature Finder (Zane Barbao, management), a social music platform designed to revolutionize the music industry.

The 2021-22 Tiger Cage kicked off last September as students developed business ideas and used the fall semester to grow and cultivate these ideas with Auburn University’s entrepreneurs-in-residence – veteran entrepreneurs housed at the university’s New Venture Accelerator. From the Tiger Cage kickoff meeting in the fall to now, this group has come a long way.

“They came in with ideas and rough pitches, and now they have fully developed business plans and practice pitches,” said Jennifer Nay, an entrepreneur-in-residence, who recently earned at MBA from the Harbert College of Business and considers herself a ‘lifelong entrepreneur.’ “We've filled in a lot of the missing elements from the first phase of the competition, and now they're really fine-tuning their pitches.”