Nisbet Venture Fund: 2025 Finalists
Zimbabwe’s healthcare system suffers from a critical shortage of medical devices, making it difficult for patients to access essential assistive equipment. The high cost of purchasing these devices forces many to remain in government hospitals longer than necessary, worsening hospital overcrowding. BridgeCare, a medical equipment rental company, is designed to address this challenge by providing affordable, short-term medical equipment loans.
Founder: Jacquelline Nyakunu ’26
NVF Mentor: Andrew Lovedale ’09
Each year, college students struggle to move out, often discarding valuable furniture, appliances, and essentials due to a lack of storage or resale options. As a result, campus dumpsters overflow with perfectly usable items, contributing to an unsustainable cycle of waste. Meanwhile, students returning in the fall spend heavily on new items, further driving waste and unnecessary expenses. Campus Swap provides a streamlined, peer-to-peer solution tailored to college students. Our platform connects outgoing students with verified local holders who temporarily store nearby items over the summer.
Founders: Henry Russell ’26, Ben Buxbaum
NVF Mentor: Andrew Edelman ’07
Davidson College students struggle to find comprehensive event information, as it is fragmented across multiple sources. This fragmentation affects all types of events, including academic, athletic, club, and town activities. SideQuest is a centralized event platform designed to enhance student engagement through gamification while providing a seamless event discovery experience for students.
Founders: Gavin Higgins ’28, Niko Cope ’28
NVF Mentor: Reid Williams
Halfcourt Analytics seamlessly integrates coaching strategy with analytics, ensuring that insights are practical, adaptable, and tailored to real basketball situations. Rather than treating coaching and analytics as separate entities, we bring them together in a single, AI-powered platform.
Founder: John Mason ’24
NVF Mentor: Bob McKillop
Agriculture is central to addressing food insecurity, yet many smallholder farmers are unable to access the necessary resources to increase productivity and contribute to food systems that can nourish growing populations. GreenSprout offers Peer-to-Peer funding solutions specifically designed for the agricultural sector. We connect farmers, agribusinesses, and agricultural projects directly with investors who are looking to fund sustainable farming practices and agricultural ventures. Through this platform, individuals or organizations can lend capital or invest in exchange for returns, bypassing traditional financial intermediaries like banks.
Founders: Tanaka Makoni ’28, Kian Sarkar ’28
NVF Mentor: Amee Parbhoo ’06
Zip aims to create a student-exclusive rideshare platform that connects college students who need convenient transportation with fellow students seeking flexible campus-job opportunities as drivers. Zip focuses on improving student safety by ensuring that riders and drivers feel more comfortable and safe knowing they are both fellow students.
Founders: Isaiah Dinar ’28, Daulet Berdikulov ’28, Cillian Hallinan ’28
NVF Mentor: Andrew Ashur ’19
Incubation Track
As the need for affordable housing expands, it is important to develop sustainable homes, allowing homeowners to lead more environmentally conscious lifestyles, something traditional affordable housing has not prioritized. Resilience Overlays creates plans for affordable net-zero modular homes, where traditional modular homes can be designed to accommodate systems like solar power, heat pumps. and electric heat pump water heaters.
Founders: Mallory Justis ’24,
NVF Mentors: Chris Langford
Bizcards is at the forefront of digital innovation in the hospitality industry, offering a virtual key card system that seamlessly integrates with guests’ mobile devices via Apple Wallet and Google Wallet. Launched in 2022, our business addresses the inefficiencies of traditional hotel check-in processes and the environmental concerns associated with plastic key cards.
Founder: Odysseas Koufos ’25
NVF Mentor: Mike Faubert
Kwale County, Kenya, produces over 20 tons of coconut husk waste daily, contributing to environmental issues like CO₂ emissions from burning and pollution in landfills, rivers, and oceans. At the same time, coconut farmers in the region face economic instability, as they have no alternative income once the coconuts are harvested. Koredo Koir turns this environmental challenge into an economic opportunity by upcycling coconut husk waste into valuable, eco-friendly products.
Founders: Victoria Ochieng ’27, Kevin Omondi, Judith Owiny
NVF Mentor: Erin Devine Martin
GrotN is a roommate-matching and rental platform designed to help individuals find compatible roommates and secure housing in the Netherlands and beyond. The platform addresses the severe housing crisis in Western Europe, where demand far exceeds supply, forcing students, expats, and low to middle income individuals into an increasingly unaffordable rental market.
Founders: Alp Niksarli ’26, Cagan Oflazoglu
NVF Mentor: Jean Pierre LeJacq
Invasive species pose a major environmental and economic threat, costing the global economy an estimated $423 billion annually (World Economic Forum, 2023). Invasive Impact Initiatives addresses this issue through a sustainable, community-driven approach by upcycling invasive species into valuable products. Our mission is to integrate invasive biomass into local supply chains, creating economic opportunities while fostering environmental stewardship.
Founder: Lorena James ’21
NVF Mentor: Evan Rozantes
The current recruiting processes are broken. They have digitized the analog process of posting job openings, applying to positions, and reviewing candidates through online job boards. This process, meant to make recruiting more accessible to candidates and employers, is the very thing that widens the gap between them. It relies on outdated means like resumes and cover letters, which get reduced to a single score with Applicant Tracking Systems. We introduce a new recruiting process that utilizes technology to inspire mutually beneficial employment relationships based on meritocracy and cultural fit between individuals and companies.
Founder: Christos Koumpotis ’23
NVF Mentor: Aru Anavekar
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