HabitAware wins 2018 MN Cup.

Byline: William Morris

Women and minority entrepreneurs and tech companies have set records from the start of the 2018 MN Cup competition, and Monday's award announcements were no different.

Minnesota's leading entrepreneurial competition awarded the $50,000 grand prize to wearable tech startup HabitAware at a banquet Monday. The runner-up this year is Carrot Health, a data analytics company serving health care and health insurance companies. Both companies are based in Minneapolis.

MN Cup is run by the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. This year's contest drew a record 1,661 applicants, with a record 45 percent of teams including women, 27 percent including founders of color and 8 percent including veterans.

Those numbers were reflected in the semifinalists and division winners, with three of nine division teams including women and two of nine with founders of color, MN Cup director Jessica Berg said.

"That's very exciting for us, because we want to see those companies not only enter, we want to see them succeed too," she said in an interview.

Winning startup HabitAware falls into both categories. Founded by Aneela Idnani and her husband, Sameer Kumar, HabitAware sells the Keen tracker, a wrist-worn device for users who compulsively bite nails, pick at their skin or display other unconscious behaviors.

Idnani, who has a condition called trichotillomania that leads to the urge to pull out her own hair, said the company has benefited from Minnesota's startup community from the beginning, when the idea was first prototyped in 24 hours at a Twin Cities hackathon event. The company also worked with the HAX Accelerator, a San Francisco-based seed group focused on hardware startups that connected them with experts and suppliers as far away as Shenzhen, China.

They knew from the start they wanted to compete in the MN Cup, and this year the time was right, Idnani said.

"Even just the application process and pitch presentation solidified a lot of the ideas we had swirling around our heads...