A team of Engineering and Computer Science (ECS) students, mentored by faculty in ECS and in the College of Business and Economics (CBE), won 3rd place and $5,000 in the Social Enterprise category at the CSU Sunstone Startup Competition.
The team pitched their venture, Bag/Get, as a social enterprise seeking to address food insecurity via proprietary software that helps food banks and pantries more efficiently and effectively meet the needs of the people who rely on them for food.
The venture was created by ECS students Rohan Kunchala, Cesar Rojas, and Alan Cortez. CSUF was allowed to send just two teams to the competition. Because the Bag/Get team won the 2023 ECS Social Justice Competition, they were asked to pitch their idea to a panel of CBE faculty that was tasked to decide on and mentor the teams sent to the competition.
After being selected to represent CSUF at the Sunstone Competition, the team worked tirelessly to update their pitch, build out the financial projections, and showcase the promise of their solution. The team was mentored by management lecturers Jeff Greenberg, John Jackson, Tom Miller, and Associate Professor of Management Atul Teckchandani, as well as by Assistant Professor of Computer Science Kanika Sood.
Kunchala took the lead in pitching the idea at the competition. He acknowledged the tremendous value of this learning experience, saying “we’re far, far better educated in the ways of product development and entrepreneurship today than we were when we began this journey.”
This is one of the many ways CBE and ECS collaborate to create more meaningful learning experiences for the students.