Elliott Brandon (right), a grad student in the Ed G. Smith College of Business, discusses his product with judges – including Jim Craig (left), associate dean for the College of Arts and Sciences – during PitchFest 2026 at UMSL’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center on Thursday. Brandon took the $2,500 first place prize for TractionPro, an attachment worn on the bottom of soccer shoes to protect the cleats from damage while guarding the wearer against slipping. (Photos by Derik Holtmann)
Innovative ideas and entrepreneurial ambition were on full display last week as University of Missouri–St. Louis students pitched ideas for new ventures to a panel of judges at the UMSL Innovation Center.
Participants ranging from freshmen to graduate students, representing three colleges, competed for funding to potentially turn their concepts into viable businesses during PitchFest 2026, hosted by the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center.
In all, there were 10 sets of participants who took their turn on stage and made their case to receive up to $2,500 in funding support. A group of UMSL faculty members and local professionals listened to each pitch and deliberated to choose a winner – not an easy task given the overall quality of the presentations.
“It was tough,” said Jim Craig, associate dean for the College of Arts and Sciences, who was one of the seven judges. “Taking your shot and missing is not an error. Not taking your shot is the mistake. So all these students took a shot, all of them were great, all of them deserve the accolades that they’re going to get from this.”
But only one of them could finish in first place. Elliott Brandon, a first-year master’s student in the Ed G. Smith College of Business, took home the $2,500 top prize for TractionPro, an attachment worn on the bottom of soccer shoes to protect the cleats from damage on non-playing surfaces. It is also meant to protect the wearer from potential slips on concrete.
“This has given me a great opportunity, a great platform to get my idea out there,” Brandon said.
It’s an idea that was born in the fall of 2024, when Brandon, then a senior playing soccer at Harris-Stowe State University, had a teammate who fell on a wet parking lot and suffered a back injury that kept him out of the lineup for two months. Since then, Brandon received a grant from BioSTL, a local non-profit that helps foster innovation, as well as assistance from the Advanced Manufacturing Innovation Center St. Louis and the Saint Louis University Center for Additive Manufacturing to make his idea a reality.
Scott Morris, Executive Director of UMSL’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center, welcomes guests, judges and participants to PitchFest 2026, an annual event allowing students to compete funding to potentially turn their concepts into viable businesses.
With the help of EIC Executive Director Scott Morris, Brandon learned on the morning of PitchFest that TractionPro had received patent-pending status.
“So now I can publicly disclose what I’m creating and talking about,” Brandon said. “The opportunity here is obviously amazing.”
Two other presentations tied for second place and earned $500. Nursing student Asmahan Ghaleb pitched HealthGuide USA, an app inspired by her mother’s health issues that addresses patient access to affordable healthcare and promotes a better understanding of healthcare options. Ethan Wallace and Victor Chiu, from the College of Business, presented MonoFilament Recycler, which offers an affordable alternative for dealing with the high amount of waste in 3D printing.
“I wasn’t as convinced back when I first started thinking about this, but I’m super convinced now that I know this is a pretty good idea,” Wallace said.
“The EIC doesn’t just provide opportunities for these ideas, but they’re also growing us,” Chiu added. “So they provided the opportunity to us, but then they coached us through how to present ourselves, gave us feedback, and then we applied the knowledge that we learned.”
Two presenters, both from the College of Business, tied for third place, each receiving $250. Daniel Anderson pitched VisibleReel, a digital content creator for small businesses, while grad student Jalen Walker-Wright presented Hey Calendar, an interactive, AI-enabled personal assistant app.
“This has been an amazing opportunity for everybody who participated to go in there and share their ideas and to really build that confidence within themselves,” Anderson said.
Which was the goal for the event. While this was the first to be called PitchFest, it’s the third hosted by EIC that encourages students to go beyond their comfort level and bet on themselves.
“I was so blown away by the actual problem-solving ideas that they were trying to convince us to fund,” said Jill Alexander, professor and public relations certificate coordinator in the Department of Communication and Media, who served as one of the judges.
“All these brilliant ideas, and they all came up with these on their own,” said Cindy Goodwin-Sak, an assistant teaching professor and director of Business Executive Education for the College of Business who helped coordinate the event along with Brittany Gürkan, EIC community engagement and operations coordinator, and graduate assistant Nick Eberhardt.
“All of them had something that they were passionate about, some sort of problem they were trying to solve,” Goodwin-Sak said, “and we just taught them how to shape it and frame it in a way that other people would be passionate about it, too. They’re going to have these same types of ideas when they work somewhere, someday, and now they’ll know how to sell them.”
It’s just another example, Morris said, of UMSL transforming the lives of its students.
“I couldn’t be more proud of the students,” Morris said. “They all just poured their heart and soul into it, really put a lot of effort into it, and when it comes across to an audience, when they’re able to tell their story to a room full of people that they’ve never met, it’s fantastic, and hopefully it does good things for them later in life too.”
