George Liu CC’17, an economics major, and Alan Gou SEAS’18, a computer science major, have won first place in the Columbia Venture Competition’s Undergraduate Challenge, sponsored by Columbia College, for their startup Palette, a platform used by teams to plan, record and learn from growth and marketing experiments. The award, which comes with $25,000 in funding, was announced by Dean James J. Valentini on April 14.

The Columbia Venture Competition’s Undergraduate Challenge, sponsored by Columbia College, asked undergraduate student teams made up of students from Columbia’s four undergraduate schools – Columbia College, Columbia Engineering, the School of General Studies and Barnard College – to compete for the challenge’s cash grants by presenting a business model. Seven finalists pitched to a panel of six judges, composed of both faculty and alumni; the top three teams were selected based on their innovative ideas and the viability of their proposals.

Along with Palette, the Undergraduate Challenge also recognized NoMor (Chiara Vallini SEAS’17, Caroline Chiu SEAS’17, HaeSeong Kimg SEAS’17, John Mavroudes SEAS’17 and Walid Rahman SEAS’17) and Pencraft (Derek Netto SEAS’17) for their entries, awarding the teams $15,000 and $10,000, respectively.

In addition, IMMPLACATE (Mariko Kanai CC’17 and Holly Wobma SEAS’20, PS’20) received third prize in the Columbia Venture Competition’s Technology Challenge, sponsored by Columbia Engineering.