From 100+ Applicants to Six: Equitech Futures Names the Finalists of the Rise Innovation Fund Challenge

Eight weeks ago, 15 teams from 12 countries arrived at the Rise Innovation Fund Challenge with a problem they couldn't stop thinking about. They spent nearly two months pressure testing their assumptions, talking with users, and running experiments to validate ideas. 

This week, Equitech Futures announced which six teams turned that pressure-testing into the strongest case for what comes next. Following the preliminary pitch competition on June 13th, the following ventures were selected to advance to the Final Pitch on July 18th, where the top three teams will take home $10,000 each and the next three will receive $5,000 each:

Cara, founded by Vinaya Sharma in the United States, started with a simple, painful observation: patients go home from surgery and largely disappear from view, often until something goes wrong. One in five surgical patients is readmitted within 30 days for reasons that were, in many cases, preventable. Cara's answer is an AI companion that knows a patient's exact care plan and stays with them through recovery, turning the silence after discharge into something that can be caught early instead of caught too late.

In Portugal, Trovador — built by Sebastião Mendonça and Marta Bernardino — is going after a problem most reforestation efforts can't reach: the steep, inaccessible terrain where machinery can't climb and human crews face serious injury risk. Their answer is an autonomous planting robot, and the market has already responded — seven restoration organizations have signed letters of intent for more than 500,000 trees, contingent on the team's pilot results holding up.

Fungi Mati, led by Roberto Carlos Navarro Félix in Mexico, is betting that the gap standing between food insecurity and a real solution isn't biology — it's knowledge. Oyster mushrooms can be grown almost anywhere, on agricultural waste, with minimal infrastructure. What's missing in rural and peri-urban Jalisco is someone to walk people through it. Fungi Mati's open-source AI assistant does exactly that, paired with a startup kit costing around $30.

Halfway around the world in Kenya, Vuna is tackling a number that's hard to sit with: smallholder farmers across Sub-Saharan Africa lose 30 to 40 percent of their perishable harvest before it ever reaches a buyer. Founder Nguru Joel Kamau is building a B2B marketplace that connects farmers to verified cold storage and urban buyers directly, cutting out the spoilage and the middlemen in one move.

Q App, founded by Elnar Salpekov and Askar Almukhamet, is rebuilding university admissions in Kazakhstan from the ground up. Right now the process is scattered across government portals, individual university websites, and offline offices — a maze that's hardest on the students who can least afford to get lost in it. The team has already secured a formal agreement with Kazakhstan's Ministry of Science and Higher Education and interest from more than ten universities, proof that the country's institutions see the same fracture Q App is trying to fix.

And in Nigeria, ChuChu AI — founded by Abigail Ojonugwa Labija, Faith Labija, and Splendour Kalu — is turning something women already use every month into a health tool. Their AI-powered sanitary pad detection app is designed to catch early signs of menstrual health conditions like fibroids, which affect 60 to 70 percent of African women by age 50 but are routinely caught too late to make early treatment simple.

About the Rise Innovation Fund Challenge

The Rise Innovation Fund Challenge is a six-week venture-building program run by Equitech Futures that supports early-stage social entrepreneurs and nonprofit innovators from the Rise network around the world. Selected from a pool of more than 100 applicants across 40 countries, all 15 participating teams received $500 in seed funding for experiments and prototyping, along with weekly workshops covering problem definition, user research, prototyping, business modeling, and pitching. The program culminates in a Final Pitch Competition during the Rise Virtual Forum, where the top six teams compete for a total of $35,000 in awards.

About Rise

Rise is a program that supports promising young people and provides them with opportunities that allow them to work together to serve others over their lifetimes. The program starts at ages 15–17 and encourages a lifetime of service and learning by providing support that includes need-based scholarships, mentorship, networking, access to career development opportunities, and the potential for additional funding as Rise Global Fellows work toward solving humanity’s most pressing problems. For more information about Rise, visit www.risefortheworld.org.

About Equitech Futures Foundation

Equitech Futures Foundation is an innovation lab and global talent hub providing hands-on mentorship, technical training, and community building for innovators developing technology solutions for social good. The organization specializes in early-stage venture development, offering comprehensive support that combines entrepreneurial education with practical resources including technical expertise, leadership communication, and access to an extensive network of technologists and entrepreneurs. Equitech Futures Foundation has worked with the Rhodes Trust, Rise, and the University of Chicago to launch institutes and forums that empower diverse groups of changemakers to transform ideas into meaningful impact. Learn more at https://www.equitechfutures.com/.