Earlier this month, 11 teams of Williams students participated in the SCALE! Venture Pitch Competition, where they brought their entrepreneurial ideas to a panel of judges who awarded cash prizes totaling more than $10,000 to help fund the students’ business ideas.

This year artificial intelligence (AI) was at the center of the competition, which included tracks for both new ideas and existing ventures. PiDoc, co-founded by Maruf Payel ’26, Theodore Mollano ’26 and Liberty Mabhena ’25, won the existing venture award, offering an app that aids STEM students in their notetaking by integrating mathematical and scientific notations into a simple format. New idea winner Sokpean Uy ’27 pitched Global Citizen, an app that helps non-English speaking immigrants pass their naturalization test with practice questions in their native language. 

Joyce Li ’28 and Olivia Thornton ’28 won the audience choice award for Ephelia’s Roots, a student-run store that, according to the organization, helps “minority students at Williams College feel at home by providing goods and services that are not easily accessible” on campus. The store is slated to open in September on the top floor of Goodrich.

Other prize-winning teams were AgriPath (Milton Vento ’26, Lee Mabhena ’25, Thianna Chisholm ’27, Simon Wainaina ’26 and Nimoh Acheampong ’27), a service to help farmers in Africa, and HirePrep (Michael Lukasevicz ’26), which uses AI to help students practice interviewing for jobs.

Each team had a few minutes to pitch their business outlines and a few minutes for Q&A with a panel of Williams alumni and Berkshires-area business leaders who offered critiques and advice: CEO and founder of BalancedWork Dan Winston ’09, co-owner of Tunnel City Coffee Jamal Stockton, venture investor and former Williams trustee Laurie Thomsen ’79, Executive Director of the Berkshire County EforAll Allison Schmitt, and CEO and co-founder of R3SET Enterprises John Lewis.

Founded in 2012 by the ’68 Center for Career Exploration as a business plan competition, it was rebranded a venture pitch competition in 2017 by the late Tonio Palmer, former director of entrepreneurship. Last year, the ’68 Center team built the first iteration of SPARK!, which presented an opportunity for students to form teams, ideate and pitch new ideas. Hope Ross Gibaldi, who joined Williams in September 2024 as the new director of entrepreneurship and innovation, built on the foundation laid by the two programs. This year’s SPARK Idea Lab was an “ideation boot camp” for students to prepare for the SCALE competition by identifying problems, iterating solutions, working collaboratively and presenting mini-pitches to one another that could be refined for the competition. This year, 40 students participated in the SPARK! Idea Lab; 22 teams applied for the SCALE! Venture Pitch Competition, and 11 teams pitched live in the finals.

Photographs by Bradley Wakoff

Bryan DiFebo-Byrne is a student worker in the Office of Communications at Williams College.

With additional reporting by Regina Velázquez, associate editor and senior writer in the Office of Communications.