MechSE sophomore Mark Van den Avont’s company, HexNest, captured second place out of 56 finalist teams at the 2019 Cozad Competition held April 10 at the I-Hotel.
The Cozad New Venture Challenge encourages students to innovate and create new businesses. Teams that make it to the finals round of competition have the opportunity to meet with venture capitalists, early-stage investors, and successful entrepreneurs who serve as judges.
HexNest is developing a sports/gymnastics mat that will cost less than those currently on the market, making the equipment more accessible. It will also have a safer design.
"We’re proud to announce that our version 3.0 prototype we finished that about a week ago," Van den Avont said. "So we now have a working mat that looks, feels, acts just like a gymnastics mat. We just have some sort of polishing do to get the safety right and some durability and different things like that. And then we’ll be hopefully getting these mats in gyms and getting customers jumping on them and get them here pretty shortly. We’re really proud of where we’ve come, lot of good people associated with it now and look out for us in the future.”
Other Cozad teams with at least one MechSE student were Ahead Materials, Inc. (Michael Doty); Daniat (Diab Abueidda and Sheikh Farhan); EVio (Richard and Robert Mauge); Filify 3D (Wes Kramer); and Verge Exotic Pet Products (Nicolas Bahr). See the accompanying photos and captions to learn about these exciting startups.