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Burton D. Morgan Competition — Fall 2025 Winners, Results & Prizes

Results from Purdue's Fall 2025 37th Burton D. Morgan Venture Concept Competition: PipeLine, Oppit, Litmetrics, special awards, finalists, judges, and participation.

By buildpurdue Team2 min read

Historical archive — Fall 2025. This recap was published in 2026 using Purdue, organizer, and founder sources.

The Fall 2025 37th Burton D. Morgan Venture Concept Competition concluded on December 10, 2025 after a venture-building process described as an 8-week journey in the launch announcement and roughly 10 weeks in post-event accounts.

Top 3 winners

PlaceVentureFoundersPrizeWhat it was building
1stPipeLineBen Gottlieb, Filippa Rodriguez$10,000Software for trade contractors focused on better job intake, dispatch, preparation, and fewer repeat visits
2ndOppitLiam Scherb, Quinten Lane$7,000Low-cost sensors and real-time visibility for legacy manufacturing equipment
3rdLitmetricsSurya Kazipeta, Archana Tatavarti$5,000AI-driven intake automation for plaintiff law firms

The results were summarized publicly in this post listing the winners and special prizes.

Read the profiles:

Other Top 10 finalists

The remaining Top 10 were Circle, FrameCut, Illume, Inara, LyoOptic, Metis, and Synq.

buildpurdue has source-backed profiles for Circle, FrameCut, Illume, Inara, LyoOptic, Metis, and Synq.

See the full finalists overview.

Special-prize winners

The public results identified:

  • Best Customer Discovery: Nova Solutions — $1,000
  • Best Pivot: Bridge — $1,000
  • This Could Be BIG: PoliStock — $1,000

PoliStock also published its own winner announcement.

Award accounting

Purdue states that the 37th competition awarded $50,000 in prizes to 13 teams. The individual awards publicly itemized on Purdue's competition archive account for $46,000:

  • Top 3: $10,000 + $7,000 + $5,000 = $22,000
  • Seven additional Top 10 teams: 7 × $3,000 = $21,000
  • Three special-prize winners: 3 × $1,000 = $3,000

That leaves $4,000 not broken out in the public itemization. buildpurdue therefore reports both facts as published and does not invent an additional award or allocation to force the arithmetic to $50,000.

Scale and judges

The official Purdue final-event page reported 120 teams and nearly 250 students. Purdue listed judges Drew Beechler, Landon Young, Katelyn Vierk, Mickey Swortzel, and Mitch Black.

What happened next

Several teams continued building after the competition. PipeLine later reported an MVP and planned paid pilot, Synq kept developing its developer workflow product, and LyoOptic's founders continued technical work inside Purdue's LyoHUB ecosystem.

For the application-period context, see the Fall 2025 cycle archive. For the next cycle, see Fall 2026.

Purdue entrepreneurshipStartup competitionsBurton D. Morgan