These were among the previous winners of the Cupid's Cup Business Competition, which said today it has started accepting applications for 2015. It’s held every year by Under Armour founder and CEO Kevin Plank and the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland's Smith School of Business.
The competition – in which student entrants from around the world will compete for $115,000 in total prizes – is named after Plank’s first business, a rose-delivery company he operated from his dorm room while he was a student at College Park.
“The goal of Cupid’s Cup is to identify and reward students who have the entrepreneurial drive and conviction to take a risk and start a business while they are young,” Plank said in a prepared statement.
This will be the competition’s 10th year. The application deadline is Jan. 5, with the final competition on April 22 at the university’s Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center.
Last year’s winner was Disease Diagnostic Group founder John Lewandowski . A graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he pitched the crowd on his company's potentially life-saving product: a small, cheap device that can quickly diagnose malaria before patients begin showing symptoms.
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