The University of Delaware’s startup team GeoSwap placed sixth at e-Fest, one of the largest undergraduate-only entrepreneurship competitions in the nation, and third in the e-Fest Innovation Challenge.

The UD startup team includes senior engineering majors Jason Bamford and Keith Doggett and senior finance major Jordan Gonzalez. Doggett and Gonzalez are both in the University Honors Program.

GeoSwap is a social networking application. It is Pokemon Go meets Dropbox meets Facebook advertising. GeoSwap brings a business’s digital data to customers when they enter a business's geography, allowing businesses to quantify and value their engagement or advertising with their customers. For users, it brings digital data out of the cloud and back down onto the ground; allowing users to know what’s happening in their community at all times.

“Our students did an incredible job representing Horn Entrepreneurship and University of Delaware,” said Vince DiFelice, faculty member and venture support lead with UD’s Horn Program in Entrepreneurship. “I interacted with faculty from some of the top entrepreneurship programs in the country and many accomplished entrepreneurs. All were extremely impressed with our students, their startup and UD. They felt Geoswap brought legitimate unique value to the contest, and they are building a company, not merely a product. These are reasonable validation points suggesting the market may ultimately decide in their favor.”

More than 160 teams from 81 schools entered the competition. Geoswap traveled to the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis to compete in the final round against the top 25 teams from the University of Wisconsin, Virginia Tech, University of Illinois, NC State, Johns Hopkins University, Auburn and 18 other schools.

In addition to the business competition, e-fest included workshops, keynote speakers and awards. The team met Richard M. Schulze, founder and chairman emeritus of Best Buy Inc., and Daymound John, “Shark Tank” regular and founder of FUBU.

“E-Fest was really a great opportunity to meet other students from around the country who were just as excited to make changes and innovation,” said Gonzalez. “It makes me all the more motivated to continue pushing with GeoSwap because I saw the world's next great innovators and just how hard they were also working to make a change.”

Geoswap is a finalist in UD’s premier startup funding competition, Hen Hatch. The team also participates in Horn Program in Entrepreneurship’s initiatives including VentureOn, Workshop Wednesday, NSF I-Corps Sites, Summer Founders and Startup Idea Pitch Parties.

E-Fest is sponsored by the Richard M. Schulze School of Entrepreneurship of the University of St. Thomas and EIX.org, a nonprofit online platform for entrepreneurship education.

About the Horn Program in Entrepreneurship

The Horn Program in Entrepreneurship ignites imaginations and empowers world changers through educational offerings that emphasize experiential learning, evidence-based entrepreneurship and active engagement with entrepreneurs and other members of the broader entrepreneurial ecosystem. Through participation in Horn Program offerings, students gain the knowledge, skills, personal capacities, experiences, connections and access to resources needed to successfully manifest innovation and thrive in the rapidly changing world.