A team of five students have been announced as the winner at this year’s Stripe Young Scientist Business Bootcamp for their project, ‘Reforma: The Reusable Crumple Zone’.
Eve Kennedy, Brian McCabe, Paddy Corcoran, Deepta Suresh, Rachel Coghlan were announced as Best Group at the inaugural bootcamp. Their project uses shape memory alloys to create vehicle crumple zones that improve passenger safety by absorbing impact energy and returning to their original shape. This reduces vehicle damage, repair costs, and automotive waste.
The Stripe Business Bootcamp, delivered in partnership with NovaUCD, enables students to further develop their entrepreneurial skills through an expanded series of workshops covering presentation techniques, business pitching, and start-up fundamentals, guided by experts from leading science and technology fields as well as home-grown successful Irish businesses.
The winning students are from Moate Community School, Westmeath; Rockwell College Tipperary; Presentation College, Galway; Dominican College, Galway and De le Salle, Dundalk, Co Louth.
The participating students and their exceptional projects were evaluated across multiple rounds of judging by a panel of industry-leading experts, including Dr Tony Scott, Co-founder of the Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition (YSTE); Lucy Molan, Head of EMEA startups at Stripe; Amy Neale, Partner at Delta Partners; and Niamh Donnelly, Co-founder of Akara.
JUDGING
Speaking on the week and judging process, Professor Pat Guiry, Chairperson of the YSTE Board, said that the standard of projects was ‘exceptionally high.
“These students did not just demonstrate the strength of their ideas, they showed their ability to communicate, work as part of a team, adapt and think like entrepreneurs. The judging panel had a very tough task in selecting a winner, and all students should be incredibly proud of what they have achieved over the week.”
Stripe’s ties to the startup community are at the core of the Business Bootcamp. The programme supports aspiring entrepreneurs on their journey to building and scaling new businesses. Stripe founders Patrick and John Collison started out as young Irish entrepreneurs, and Patrick won the Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition in 2005.
For more information on Stripe’s Business Bootcamp, and next year’s Stripe YSTE taking place from 6-9 January 2027, please visit https://stripeyste.com
