Last summer, we told you about a new competition sponsored by Pejman Mar Ventures , a two-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca., venture firm with close ties to Stanford and a growing interest in technologies coming out of the University of California, Berkeley.
Today, the firm is announcing that the winner of that competition. Evidently, it couldn’t resist creating two new award categories, too, owing to the quality of the companies with which it met.
The central, $250,000 prize — which could have been won by any UC Berkeley student, faculty member, or alum – goes to DotDashPay .
DotDashPay is developing a hardware and software platform that promises to make it easy for machine makers to implement payments. All it takes, says its founders – both of whom are computer science Ph.D candidates at UC — is a couple of wires and a few lines of code to accept credit cards, Apple Pay, Google Wallet, Android Pay, Bitcoin, and more on nearly any machine.
In an additional boon for UC Berkeley, the school will receive 10 percent of Pejman Mar’s stake in DotDashPayo. (We don’t know exactly what that translates into; Pejman Mar isn’t saying how big a stake it’s getting for it’s $250,000 check.)
A second company that Pejman Mar decided to fund with a smaller, $20,000 uncapped note is Tinkering Labs , a company that provides its young users with parts and ideas about what they can make entirely on their own. (One kit comes with markers, screw drivers, a small motor and numerous wooden pieces, along with suggestion cards, including to “build a machine that draws curvy lines.”)
Tinkering Labs, which won Pejman Mar’s “edtech award,” was cofounded by Gever Tulley, a writer, speaker, computer scientist, and serial entrepreneur who happens to be a UC Berkeley alum.
Last, Pejman Mar wrote a $5,000 check […]
