By Lacie Blankenship
Wenitte Apiou (BE’24) walked away from January’s Firestarter Pitch Competition with $500 prize money to go toward the company he founded, Daedalus.
The Center for Entrepreneurship (C4E)-hosted quarterly event gives all Vanderbilt students (undergraduate and graduate) a chance to pitch a business concept in any stage of development. While the prize money is certainly an incentive, the experience and feedback all participants gain is invaluable.
The most recent competition had 6 participating companies represented by students from Vanderbilt Business, the School of Medicine, the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Program, and the undergraduate college. The startups, and the students pitching them, included Daedalus; Mighty Blendz, pitched by Kayla Vine; CashChain, pitched by Ricky LaChance; 4D Healing, pitched by Pulak Goswami, Eden Maloney, and Dennis Zhou; Solar Aqua Flex, pitched by Drew Horseman; and TuneHatch, pitched by Christal Hector and Nathan Youssef.
Daedalus is a company that allows users to create custom stock and cryptocurrency trading bots without code. Apiou built a no-code visual editor to create stock and crypto trading strategies from powerful building blocks, so that when someone invests in a strategy, Daedalus automatically executes trades on their behalf based on the underlying strategy’s logic.
Wenitte Apiou
Apiou believes that “Algorithmic Trading should not be exclusive to elite firms and hedge funds,” and Daedalus is his strategic effort to level the playing field.
A second-year undergraduate, Apiou is a member of Alpha Kappa Psi Professional Business Fraternity and the Vanderbilt Innovation and Entrepreneurship Society (VINES). In addition to Daedalus, Apiou is the Founder and CEO of Mandla Inc., a company that builds Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools for the future of Africa.
“I’m grateful for the support of Vanderbilt and the Center for Entrepreneurship as I continue on my journey to democratize Algorithmic Trading for all,” says Apiou.
Judges for the January Firestarter came from a variety of entrepreneurial backgrounds and provided feedback and advice participants could apply to their current company’s pitch and future pitches. The judges were Ethan Fedida (BA’12), Co-Founder of Campfire Group; Jeremy Padawer (MBA’01), Chief Brand Officer at Jazwares; Woody Klemmer (BA’13), Founder & CEO of Gladly Do and Head of Growth at Formativ; Daniel Eckman (MBA’09), Founder of PACCHN; and Avery Fisher (MBA’11), CEO of HPA.
To read the C4E’s blog post on the January Firestarter, click here.
