In a sea of startups pitching AI inventions, UConn entrepreneur, Jasdeep Singh ’21 MBA, spotted a more valuable way to tell his company\u2019s story about microneedles.<\/p>\n
His strategy: use a thoughtful narrative to humanize an abstract problem.<\/p>\n
With just a three-minute pitch that can be viewed here,<\/a> Singh\u2019s company, STMPatch,<\/a> won the 15th Annual SXSW Festival\u2019s Food, Nutrition, and Health category, beating nearly 1,000 applicants and 45 finalists. The event was held March 9-10 at the SXSW 2024 Conference & Festivals in Austin, Texas.<\/p>\n \u201cThis year\u2019s participating companies represent the most cutting-edge technologies from around the world, with the highest caliber of applicants since SXSW Pitch\u2019s beginning,\u201d according to the SXSW announcement. \u201cTo date, 647 companies have participated in SXSW Pitch, with over 93% receiving funding and acquisitions in excess of almost $23.2 billion.\u201d<\/p>\n STMPatch<\/u> is a microneedle and drug development business that has the potential to revolutionize access to lifesaving pharmaceutical products in animals and humans. The technology supports most types of vaccines and therapeutics, including large molecules and any compound that benefits from multiple longitudinal dosing.\u00a0The company started at the Connecticut Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation (CCEI) in the Fall of 2020. Thahn Nguyen, PhD, UConn associate professor of mechanical engineering and c<\/span>hief technology officer at STMPatch, and his team went through<\/span> UConn\u2019s National Science Foundation Innovation Corps (I-Corps) Program, <\/span><\/a>Accelerate UConn<\/a>.<\/a> The business launched with additional support from UConn\u2019s Technology Commercialization Services Department.<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cWinning this pitch was a testament to our ability to connect the importance of our product to everyone’s existence,\u201d Singh says. \u201cStorytelling can have a beginning, an arc, and it can also mean just putting context to your answer. The key is to make the tech understandable, which is why using lay language is so important.\u201d<\/p>\n Singh notes his company was the only one at SXSW that mentioned animal health. He also believes STMPatch\u2019s<\/u> \u00a0\u201cability to help everyone in the supply chain\u201d proved to be an advantage, particularly since so many other startups were pitching AI ideas that could replace humans.<\/p>\n \u201cOur company\u2019s long-term goal is human health. We were the only ones to not only talk about animal health, but to connect animal health to food and illnesses that move across species,\u201d Singh says.<\/p>\n It was this innate ability to help judges understand the bigger picture impact that ultimately helped Singh land the winning pitch.<\/p>\n In about three years, he says his goal is to pivot his company from animals to humans. In the meantime, he plans to focus on market testing and scaling market validity.<\/p>\n \u201cI am so passionate about our product and mission that each and every opportunity to speak about our company motivates me even more to push forward,\u201d he notes. \u201cThis was one of our biggest stages and I am deeply moved by the panel\u2019s belief in the \u2018what\u2019 and \u2018why\u2019 we are working so hard to improve health worldwide.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" With the highest caliber of applicants in the festival\u2019s history, STMPatch Wins Food, Nutrition, Health Category<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":207,"featured_media":211351,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[147,1731,2076,1862,2364,2235],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2599],"class_list":["post-211346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","category-entrepreneurship","category-research","category-busn","category-technology-commercialization","category-today-homepage"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-07 04:41:29","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/207"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211346"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211346\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":211381,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211346\/revisions\/211381"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/211351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211346"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=211346"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=211346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}