“Don’t go where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” This was the sage advice shared by Dan Jenkins with the 10 teams participating in the grand finale of the 2026 Stella Zhang New Venture Competition, housed in UC Irvine’s Paul Merage School of Business.

The event is in its 22^nd year, and Jenkins has been one of its co-chairs since 2014. He’s also an honorary board member for UC Irvine’s Beall Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, whose faculty director, Imran Currim, offered this additional thought about the competition: “It takes a village.”

That village is populated by many people, including myriad sponsors, volunteers who act as mentors and judges, and the contestants themselves: teams consisting of students, faculty, researchers, staff and community members who are enthused to launch a startup and turn their idea into a real business.

We’re shining a spotlight on the Stella Zhang New Venture Competition in this episode of The UC Irvine Podcast. We’ll speak with Sakhi Patel, a graduate student in UC Irvine’s School of Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences, whose lived experiences inspired her team’s business, CuraVoice. We’ll also hear from Alicia Rantos and Ernie Rapp, two of the event’s 160 volunteer coaches and judges. And we’ll take listeners inside the Merage School’s SB1 Auditorium on May 21, when the finalists presented their pitches to dazzle the panel and audience and win prize money that could help them achieve their goals.

Featured Guests:

Sakhi Patel, CEO and co-founder of CuraVoice

Sakhi Patel, CEO and co-founder of CuraVoice, presents her team’s three-minute “Shark Tank”-style pitch to judges and the audience at the grand finale of the 2026 Stella Zhang New Venture Competition, held in the SB1 Auditorium at UC Irvine’s Paul Merage School of Business.

Alicia Rantos, alumna, mentor and judge for the Stella Zhang New Venture Competition

Alicia Rantos, manager of cybersecurity governance and global customer success for Aheva and a cybersecurity course instructor at Cal State Long Beach, earned an MBA at UC Irvine’s Paul Merage School of Business in 2007. She has volunteered as a judge for the Stella Zhang New Venture Competition for the past eight years, adding the role of coach in 2026.

Ernie Rapp, mentor and judge for the Stella Zhang New Venture Competition

Ernie Rapp, chief business development officer for Precision Health Holdings, has volunteered as a mentor and judge for the Stella Zhang New Venture Competition for the past four years and plans to return annually to those roles “as long as he’s here.”

“Blazing Nights of Light,” the music featured throughout this episode, was provided by The Whole Other via the audio library in YouTube Studio.

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TRANSCRIPT

Larry Wilk, from Stella Zhang New Venture Competition (SZNVC) on May 21, 2026:

[Crowd noise] Good evening. Good evening. Welcome to our 22nd annual New Venture Competition 2026. [Audience applause] There you go, there we go.

Cara Capuano / UC Irvine Podcast:

That’s Larry Wilk, welcoming the crowd gathered at an auditorium at UC Irvine’s Paul Merage School of Business. I’m Cara Capuano. This special UC Irvine Podcast is dedicated to the Stella Zhang New Venture Competition, an event created to spark innovation and empower entrepreneurs. Let’s go back to that grand finale event on May 21st, 2026.

Wilk, the faculty director of the ANTrepreneur Center, briefly explained the contest’s rules, then welcomed Merage Dean Ian Williamson to the stage.

Ian Williamson, from SZNVC:

I always say every year, this is the night where we watch the stars being born because we have so many phenomenal organizations. Just to get to this point is so exceptional. And so, we have 10 teams tonight, which I am very excited to see. I always am amazed at what they come up with. But I have to acknowledge that this is a process, right? Entrepreneurship is not that “aha moment.” It’s a process. It’s a lot of labor. It took months and months and months.

Capuano:

The laborious journey for participating teams begins in the fall. After deciding what kind of startup they want to launch, teams submit a three-page concept paper to explain their idea. Teams compete in one of five tracks, and each team must have two to six members with at least two enrolled UC Irvine students.

If their concept paper is approved, teams will receive guidance and feedback from mentors and judges who understand their business type. The next step is the semifinals. Teams refine their ideas and present a 10-minute boardroom pitch with a 10-minute question and answer session. The first- and second-place teams from each track are then invited to the grand finale where they’ll have three minutes to impress the judges followed by a five-minute Q&A.

Larry Wilk succinctly summed up the stages during his introduction.

Wilk, from SZNVC:

We’ve helped them prepare through the 12 workshops and countless meetings with our coaches and judges. We teach them a methodology that’s the same across campus. They practice their presentations. They get feedback on their pitches, leading to the experience where they come up with an idea that’s viable, that’s solving a real problem that people have, not a solution in search of a problem.

Capuano:

Wilk added that for this year’s edition, there were 160 concept papers submitted featuring over 500 participants across campus. 54 semifinalists participated in the boardroom pitches semifinals round, receiving assistance from 160 coaches and judges along the way. From those 54 teams, 10 groups took the stage in May, following some encouragement from Dean Williamson.

Williamson, from SZNVC:

You came up with something that perhaps nobody else saw or perhaps nobody else was willing to take the risk to try. You found a few other friends who believed at least enough of what you were saying to try it with you and then you go on this journey together and tonight you get a chance to kind of say, “Hey, I think we found something. I think there’s something here.” And can you convince others to get behind it? There’s such an exciting experience doing that.

And so, to have this as part of our community, to be able to do that not just for the students that study business, but for our entire campus and our community is really an honor.

Capuano:

The honor of being the first group to compete during the grand finale went to the team named CuraVoice, from the Consumer Services category. CEO and co-founder, Sakhi Patel, is a pharmacy student who wanted more assistance with learning how to counsel patients. Here’s part of the three-minute pitch she delivered on CuraVoice’s behalf.

Sakhi Patel, from CuraVoice pitch at SZNVC:

The healthcare system as a whole loses $12 billion every single year in communication failures. And this starts with the way that we train our providers.

The gold standard for patient communication training is hiring actors to play as simulated patients and then grading the students on their performance. This takes a lot of time, a lot of money, and the worst part is we as students never really know where we messed up.

So, what are we doing to solve this problem? We built CuraVoice, which is an AI-powered platform that lets healthcare students practice patient conversations out loud and get real-time feedback on their performance. We use a proprietary small language model built on 2000 patient-student conversations as well as clinical guidelines to make sure the feedback students get is both clinically accurate and relevant to empathy.

Who is our end user, you might ask? Well, first, healthcare students. Healthcare students can upload their lecture notes and get quizzes, flashcards, everything they need in order to learn the info, and then AI patients so that they can practice speaking the information. Faculty also get a dashboard to show where their students are messing up the most.

Second user: the healthcare provider. Healthcare providers can do continuing education credits, workforce training, and even brush up on skills they might not have the most time with.

And lastly, the hiring manager. Resumes will tell you whether an employee is good on paper, but not if they can communicate with patients. With CuraVoice, employers can make this decision confidently. So far on our platform, we have about 500-plus users across 100 healthcare institutions. We’ve been featured by NVIDIA for our use of their technology, a partnership with the Orange County Pharmacist Association, as well as a B2B paid contract with an independent pharmacy using our software to train their staff.

We’ve also done a pilot with the UCI School of Pharmacy. One day, we’re all going to become patients. So, let’s make sure the voice at your bedside is ready. Every cure begins with a voice. Thank you for listening. [Audience applause]

Capuano:

CuraVoice’s path to the grand finale stage was particularly unique. Sakhi Patel told me their concept paper was initially rejected, but then they were invited to participate in the semifinals, where the strength of their 10-minute boardroom pitch elevated them into the top two teams in their division.

Sakhi Patel:

I think it was a true testament to the idea that we have and, like, how much we believe in it. Because at first, we were a little discouraged, but once we kind of got the feel of, “Okay, there is a chance that people will believe in our idea,” we kind of put our all into the boardroom pitch. And I think we definitely saw that come to fruition by making it to the final round.

Capuano:

One person who believed in CuraVoice from the start was their assigned mentor, Alicia Rantos.

Alicia Rantos:

They’re utilizing AI in a really great way, and AI is… I don’t want to say “taking over,” but we could kind of say that. So, it’s really blowing up in every area these days. So, it’s great that they’re using it – leveraging it – in this way.

And I think it’s really important that our medical staff have good bedside manner abilities. (laughs) We probably all – or most of us – have experienced doctors that didn’t have such great bedside manner, and we know how that really affects things. And then doctors that have really great – can really talk to patients or talk to us in a really great way – it makes such a difference.

Capuano:

Rantos earned her MBA from the Paul Merage School of Business in 2007 and has been involved with the competition for eight years. 2026 marked her first experience as a coach, and she looks forward to reprising that role next year.

Ernie Rapp has volunteered as a mentor and judge the past four years. Based on his own professional experiences, he sees the value CuraVoice can offer to community pharmacies.

Ernie Rapp:

If you think about a small business owner and them being able to translate everything in their brain about how they interact with their customers to a new staff person, they just don’t have the time. And using a database filled with knowledge and artificial intelligence and learning how to communicate, not necessarily just clinically, but interactively with customers, what a great use of artificial intelligence.

Capuano:

At evening’s end, CuraVoice earned $5,000 for taking second place in Consumer Services.

Pipeline took first place in the category for a $10,000 prize and also won the event’s grand prize of $20,000. Pipeline created an AI-powered, personalized planning platform that helps community college students simplify the transfer process. Of the 10 prizes awarded over the evening, eight were given to teams whose ideas integrated AI. Ernie Rapp thinks that’s a sign of what’s to come.

Rapp:

I think we’re at a seismic shift in education in so many different industries given the world of AI. If your audience is hearing about this competition for the first time through this podcast, then I would encourage them to get started thinking about how to solve real world problems and seeing if they can become an entrepreneur.

Working for a company that at some point will be required to reduce or eliminate roles in their companies due to the advent of artificial intelligence is a real concern. So, starting your own business might very well be a path towards success as opposed to getting a job.

Capuano:

Rap’s comment compliments another made during the grand finale by Imran Currim, Distinguished Professor of marketing and faculty director of the Beall Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

Imran Currim, from SZNVC:

Our mission is to ignite innovation and entrepreneurship for the next century.

Why? Simple. Because the tsunami of the coming generation will be very different from the tsunami of past generations.

In what way? Well, lots of ways. But one way is that in past generations, people were happy to work for large, established companies. The coming generation I’m finding wants to work for themselves.

Capuano:

That’s certainly true for CuraVoice. Sakhi Patel and her teammates – co-founder Shrey Modi, Harsh Lakani, UC Irvine Law student Adelaide Apostol, and UC Irvine computer science undergraduate Tobin Sia – are optimistic about the future of their budding business.

Patel:

Pretty much most of our interviews come back as, “There’s nothing I would fix about the tool. Like, I love using it so much. It helps me so much with school.” I think just seeing the positive impact that it has for other people is really what gives us optimism and hope and gives us the motivation to sort of keep building the tool.

Capuano:

Patel anticipates completing her Doctor of Pharmacy degree in May of 2027. Then she’ll focus on expanding CuraVoice’s goals while also going into community pharmacy to continue to build relationships with patients and see firsthand what’s needed.

Patel:

I think there’s a lot of entrepreneurs that are sort of bringing in the expertise that they have from their fields and building companies and building products and building ideas out of their lived experiences. And I think that’s so important.

Capuano:

Today’s entrepreneurs leaning on their lived experiences to solve real problems. Stella Zhang, who first sponsored the new venture competition in 2022, has committed to continuing to do so through 2031. At this year’s event, she reminded teams it’s not only about the prize money.

Stella Zhang, from SZNVC:

It’s about opportunity. It’s about experience. I hope you have enjoyed the whole course of the competition from Day 1. And I hope your path of entrepreneurship never stops. We need you. Our lives need you. I hope one day your brilliant idea will change our lives. Truly. Yes. Thank you. [Audience applause]

Capuano:

And thank you for listening. I’m Cara Capuano. For the latest UC Irvine News, please visit news.uci.edu. The UC Irvine Podcast is a production of Strategic Communications and Public Affairs at the University of California, Irvine. Please subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.