Catchafire Takes 2nd Place at DFJ Gotham East Coast Venture Challenge

Congratulations to DSC 2008 - 2009 Social Enterprise track winners Rachael Chong and the Catchafire team for taking 2nd place at the DFJ Gotham East Coast Venture Challenge!

On Wednesday May 27th, DFJ and DFJ Gotham hosted the 3rd Annual $250,000 East Coast Venture Challenge. The ECVC offers student entrepreneurs from top universities across the East Coast the chance to pitch their ideas to a panel of venture capital judges from DFJ and DFJ Gotham. The goal of the competition is to promote student involvement in entrepreneurial endeavors, and the winner receives a $250,000 investment.

The format of this year’s ECVC consisted of two rounds. The first round was an online voting process hosted at ecvc.studentbusinesses.com, and the final event was held at Columbia University. The final event was an exciting day, complete with two rounds of pitching and Q&A, which concluded when the judges selected a winner – Digiceipt from Cornell University. Digiceipt, launched by Keith Cowing and Aaron Nathan, is a service to manage your receipts on the web, providing peace of mind to consumers and targeting solutions to companies.

As a bonus prize, Digiceipt will also be entered into the DFJ-Cisco Global Business Plan Competition, where they will be competing for an additional prize of at least $250,000. Three other teams from the ECVC will be joining Digiceipt at the global competition: Catchafire (Duke), Everest Scientific (Columbia), and BizWiz (Johns Hopkins). We wish all of the teams the best of luck, especially those competing next month in the global competition.

This event is always one of the key highlights on the annual DFJ Gotham calendar, and we had a great time listening to enthusiastic student entrepreneurs share their ideas. Thank our sponsors the Columbia Alumni Association, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, and StudentBusinesses.com for providing the venue, legal support, and online support necessary to make this year’s ECVC a success.

Congratulations again to Rachael Chong and the Catchafire team for taking 2nd place!