NJIT Student Earns Top Prize in Statewide Business Pitch Competition

A computer science major at New Jersey Institute of Technology has earned the top prize in a statewide collegiate competition that judges pitches for innovative business ideas.

The student, Yashwee Kothari ’22, pitched a mobile application for tracking the symptoms of people recovering from traumatic brain injuries – an idea she has been developing since high school. 

It’s the first time a NJIT student has earned first place in the competition – a partnership of UPitch New Jersey and Nokia Bell Labs that began in 2016. Kothari’s pitch also earned the audience choice award. She intends to use prize money from the awards to further the development of her app, ReLeaf. 

“Winning first place is validation that industry professionals and the general public — not just me — also see great potential in ReLeaf,” said Kothari, a student at both NJIT’s Ying Wu College of Computing and its Albert Dorman Honors College. “It is an exciting achievement because I am putting ReLeaf out there, networking and learning.” 

Kothari was among six finalists in the competition who emerged from an initial field of 12, each representing a New Jersey college. The other five were from Princeton, Rowan, Rutgers, Seton Hall and Stevens. Via web conferencing, the finalists presented to six judges from Nokia and NGP Capital, with the second half of their 15-minute pitches devoted to questions. 

One judge asked Kothari if she had considered developing a therapeutics app instead, which she deftly answered with research supporting the demand for monitoring. As she noted in her first-round presentation to UPitchNJ — the one that got her to the finals — 41% of patients with moderate to severe traumatic brain injuries don’t get a follow-up visit with doctors within three months of their injuries and when they do, only about 2 minutes of the doctor’s time is spent talking to the patient. This need was further reinforced through Kothari’s own research, in which she tested the app with 11 patients last summer, asking them a series of questions each week and presenting them with a graphic-driven progress report after one month.

Under Kothari’s business plan, doctors would pay a monthly per patient fee for the app, which may be reimbursable through the patient’s health insurance. In return, they’d receive valuable data, delivered weekly without the need for appointments.

Clearly, the detail-orientated Kothari had ample data going into her final pitch. But she also had to be poised. For that, she practiced with mentors Will Lutz and Cat Tsavalas from VentureLink — NJIT’s on-campus incubator for startups — and Nokia. It also helped that she had pitched her idea previously, including in NJIT’s New Business Model Contest in December, where she claimed the top student prize, thereby earning her invite to UPitchNJ.

Her mentors are particularly impressed with Kothari’s passion for ReLeaf. As Michael Ehrlich, an associate professor at NJIT’s Martin Tuchman School of Management, put it, “She really wants to make this happen.” Added Associate Professor Yvette Wohn, her research advisor: “She is extremely driven and has a very strong entrepreneurial spirit.” Lutz concurred, adding, “Yashwee's secret superpower is the ability to talk to people and imagine a practical and applied solution to whatever it is they are dealing with. And to do it in a caring, considerate, human-centric way.”

UPitchNJ is a consortium of entrepreneurship faculty and directors from N.J.’s four-year colleges that celebrates the ingenuity and creativity of college students, with the goal of helping them launch businesses that will fuel innovation, economic growth and job creation in the state. 

Beyond the pitch competition, UPitchNJ supports campus entrepreneurship and innovation initiatives. At NJIT, that includes VentureLink, a joint program with its New Jersey Innovation Institute; the N.J. Innovation Acceleration Center, which Ehrlich directs; the National Science Foundation I-Corps program; and the Entrepreneur Society student club. As an undergraduate, Kothari accesses all the above.

So, what’s next for ReLeaf? Further development at the NJIT Lean Startup Accelerator program this summer. As Kothari explained, “There is a lot of work to be done and this is only the beginning!”