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Finalists
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Maggie
Hughes

Co-Founder & CEO | Voice to Vision
Listen. Organize. Act.

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MIT Media Lab

Voice to Vision (V2V) is a civic technology platform that transforms community engagement into lasting democratic infrastructure. Initially developed with the NYC Department of City Planning and deployed across government planning processes and grassroots organizing campaigns, V2V gives institutions and organizers the tools to systematically listen to, make sense of, and act on community input, and then close the loop by showing residents how their voices shaped outcomes.

Where most civic engagement produces reports that disappear, V2V builds institutional memory. The platform combines two integrated layers: a systematic community listening and sensemaking tool that surfaces themes, patterns, and decisions from engagement data, and a relational organizing data infrastructure that tracks relationships, capacity, and power over time. 

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Carolina
Goncebat

Co-founder & CEO | My Phoenyx
Language learning designed for early childhood

MIT Sloan 2020

My Phoenyx is an AI-powered bilingual companion that helps children learn a second language through daily conversation and play. Today, most families want their children to grow up bilingual, but traditional solutions like tutors, immersion schools, or travel are expensive and inaccessible to many families. My Phoenyx makes early language exposure affordable and engaging through a screen-free AI toy that talks with children, teaches vocabulary through stories and games, and adapts to each child’s learning pace. Parents receive summaries of daily interactions while children build confidence speaking a new language. The company is currently piloting the product with early families and educators while preparing for a broader launch. Our vision is to build the first lifelong AI language companion that grows with children — starting as a toy and evolving into a personalized learning platform.

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Nadeen
Issa

Co-founder & CRO | femmli

Speak your body's language

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MIT Sloan 2026

femmli leverages biosensor technology to track hormones continuously, enabling women navigating perimenopause to more accurately and confidently understand their bodies and take control over their health.

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Mariam
Kira

Co-founder & CEO | myNerva

Intelligence that runs anywhere… not limited by resources

MIT EMBA 2027

myNerva focuses on building distributed, energy-efficient AI systems composed of many small intelligent agents rather than a single centralized model. Instead of sending all data to cloud data centers, tiny AI models run directly on edge devices—such as sensors, microcontrollers, cameras, and local servers. These models analyze data locally and only communicate important insights when necessary. By coordinating as a collaborative swarm, these agents collectively solve complex tasks while dramatically reducing energy use, latency, and communication costs. We are targeting customers at power grids, industrial monitoring, environmental sensing, and smart cities. 

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Taylor
Rose

Co-founder & CEO | Kinstead Health

The AI operating system for independent practices.

MIT Courses 15 + 17, Class of 2016

Kinstead empowers nurse practitioners to launch and grow private practices, bringing healthcare back into communities. Our AI-powered platform streamlines operations and compliance so clinicians can focus on delivering family-centered, integrated care, accessible in every neighborhood. This is the future of community-based, patient-driven healthcare.

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Andrea
Sheperd

Co-Founder & CEO | PowerHouse VPP

The Power Plant of the Modern Grid

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MIT Sloan EMBA Class of 2026

The electric grid is facing unprecedented demand from electrification, AI, and data centers. At the same time, the rapid growth of renewable resources like solar and wind, along with increasingly extreme weather, is adding new complexity to maintaining reliability. PowerHouse provides an immediate solution by deploying and aggregating residential batteries to deliver flexible, reliable power exactly when the grid needs it most. By integrating directly with utilities, PowerHouse turns homes into a network of controllable energy—a virtual power plant—improving reliability, reducing peak costs, and meeting rising demand without building massive new infrastructure. The grid’s biggest challenges are happening now. PowerHouse unlocks capacity that already exists, accelerating the transition to a more resilient, affordable, and sustainable future.

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Victoria
Tostado

Co-founder & CEO | Agxes

Agricultural Credit Intelligence Infrastructure

MIT Course 15 SFMBA 2024

Agxes released the first AI AgLoan assistant eliminating the paper-heavy processes that make agricultural lending slow and costly for financial institutions, saving 95% of time by replacing spreadsheets, PDFs, and limited agronomic expertise with a scalable solution. Agxes brings transparency and control through smart expense cards and real-time data insights.

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Lucy
Wu

Co-founder & CEO | PeraWatt

Redefining power efficiency with advanced magnetic materials

MIT Course 1 Class of 2009

PeraWatt is an advanced materials startup bringing a new class of magnetic materials to market to dramatically improve energy efficiency in power-hungry systems like AI data centers, electric vehicles, and consumer electronics. Our breakthrough technology delivers 10x higher power efficiency than legacy materials, enabling smaller, lighter, and more efficient devices. By redefining efficiency across energy systems, we’re reducing global emissions and building the foundation for a more efficient, electrified world that enables the next wave of AI and high-performance technologies.

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