These Three Finalists Will Vie For The $50K Prize In WashU Olin’s BIG IdeaBounce Pitch Contest

Miles Lanham was running track for the University of Virginia when one of his teammates collapsed to the ground, struggling to breathe. A biomedical major, he has co-founded a startup that makes a wearable, multi-pack rescue inhaler designed to help respiratory disease patients who have experienced a potentially life-threatening flare-up without access to their medication.

A former NCAA tennis player and current MBA student at Olin Business School, Sergiu Celebidachi toured the world as an all-court player. He’s developed a mental performance app for college athletes to help them deal with the psychological challenges of competition.

For Caroline Holt, getting a handle on her health records became a passion project. The MBA student at the Darden School of Business leads a team that has created an app to capture, store, analyze, search, share, and manage their medical records across many patient portals.

THREE FINALISTS IN WASHU OLIN’S 2025 BIG IDEABOUNCE COMPETITION

These three finalists will vie for the $50,000 top prize in Washington University’s Olin Business School BIG IdeaBounce competition in St. Louis. Their teams will compete against each other before a panel of judges in a shark tank environment to see who comes out the big winner. These student entrepreneurs in the business of health overcame two hurdles before emerging as finalists. Their ideas stood out from some 82 submissions that poured in from 43 universities and 14 countries. Then, those entries were narrowed down by judges to 13 contenders.

Now, it comes down to the final three. Each will bring their solid ideas in the business of health that come from personal experience.

The Portahaler by Métopi is meant to be a solution for the 545 million people suffering from respiratory diseases. Insurance policies often limit patients to a single inhaler per prescription, leaving many unprotected in critical moments. For those seeking additional inhalers, out-of-pocket costs can reach up to $500 per unit. The first wearable, multi-pack prescriptible rescue inhaler, the Portahaler is designed to attach seamlessly to a phone, wrist, or keychain, ensuring they always have access to rescue medication. Each inhaler contains 40 doses, allowing for a novel multi-pack prescription system of up to five units. What’s more, it would cost no more than $60.

Lanham, who will graduate from the University of Virginia with a degree in biomedical engineering in 2027, co-founded the startup with Rohan Bansal, who earned his MBA with a specialization in life sciences from Darden last year. Their team includes biology major Benjamin Joseph and economics major Evan Burita, both of whom will graduate from UVA in 2027.

SPARC Sports is the brainchild of Celebidachi who will graduate with his MBA in entrepreneurship from Olin this year. He teamed up with a board-certified sports psychologist who has worked with Olympian athletes and a tech lead from a billion-dollar company. He found that despite the increasing recognition of mental strength as a key factor in peak performance, only 65 out of 253 Division I athletic departments offer mental performance or health services. In fact, there is just one mental health professional for every 1,900 athletes. Yet, private sessions average more than $250 per hour, making support inaccessible to many struggling athletes.

Their solution: An AI-driven mental training platform that replicates the experience of working with a sports psychologist through interactive exercises, structured video lessons, and personalized training modules. The platform delivers what Celebidachi calls “actionable, structured, and tangible training tools that allow athletes to actively develop focus, resilience, and mental toughness in real-time.”

It took hundreds of visits with doctors for Holt to discover she had a chronic multi-systemic medical issue. So while earning her MBA at Darden, she teamed up with fellow MBA student Justin Ryan and former OpFocus CEO Astrid Domenico to form Patient Led Health. The health tech startup is developing an app called Coalesce for people who want control over their medical reccord.

Coalesce integrates with medical portals as a patient-centered hub to curate, analyze, visualize, and share images, reports or aspects of their records with other providers or caregivers. The startup leverages AI to analyze patient records and identify insights across previously siloed information. It then shares preventative health suggestions, catalogs diagnostic test results, immunization records, and a patient’s prescriptions to prepare for specialist appointments.

The team intends to focus on key niches, including people who live with chronic illness, parents managing their own health care and that of their children, seniors, and divorced partners, all segments that may have trouble assessing their complete medical records.

See the following pages for their full submissions, including each team’s two-minute video elevator pitches