SIPA Students Win $75,000 for Ventures in Fintech, Legal Tech, Education, and Infrastructure

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Four student teams took home a combined $75,000 at SIPA’s 2025–26 Annual Global Policy Challenge, the school’s competition for policy-driven ventures that leverage technology and data to address pressing global challenges.

The winners were announced on April 23 at a campus-wide celebration hosted by the Campbell Center for Entrepreneurship at the Brown Center at the Columbia Journalism School. Nine finalist teams competed across the challenge’s four core themes: geopolitical stability, democratic resilience, climate and sustainable development, and inclusive prosperity and macroeconomic stability.

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The first-place prize of $25,000 was awarded to Perpetua, a platform that modernizes the estate-settlement process for grieving families. Using guided workflows, automated asset discovery, and secure document tools, Perpetua aims to reduce errors and ease the administrative burden that often compounds an already difficult moment. The team includes Shruti Das MPA-DP ’26 and Jacqueline Deprey ’26BUS.

"We’re basically your one-stop shop for anything [related to] estate settlement," said Das. "Now we’re going to take this money and actually build our company and go full time after we both graduate in May." 

BlockBridge received the second-place award of $20,000 for its work building financial infrastructure that enables humanitarian organizations to use stablecoins for cross-border aid delivery, making the process faster, more transparent, and more cost-effective. Team members include Annie-Marie Fawaz Gergi MPA-GL ’26, Carly Bainbridge MPA ’26, and Leticia Salmon MPA ’27.

Clase Viva and Infralytica each received $15,000. Clase Viva supports rural teachers in Colombia with a multigrade instructional model designed for one-room classrooms, grounding its approach in playful, culturally resonant pedagogy. The team includes Natalia Martin MPA ’26, Sarah Bruce MPA-DP ’27, and Vivian Martins Bertelli MPA-DP ’27. Infralytica uses artificial intelligence to accelerate the preparation of infrastructure projects, automating regulatory reviews, compliance checks, and document generation to cut down on time-intensive preparatory work. The team includes Maria Paula Bejarano MPA ’26.

The 2025–26 competition attracted a record 48 applicant teams, its largest pool in recent years, with nine advancing to the final round. According to Sarah Holloway, director of the MPA program and longtime co-lead of the challenge alongside founder and SIPA Dean Emerita Merit E. Janow, the program’s true impact lies in its dual offering of funding and expert validation, helping transform ideas into viable ventures.

"The recognition from the judges that your idea is good and you should go out and try it, coupled with funding, is the difference between someone actually starting their venture and not," she said.

“What impresses me so much about SIPA students is their ability to bridge rigorous policy training with practical innovation,” said Columbia SIPA Dean Keren Yarhi-Milo, who also attended the celebration. “These student ventures demonstrate how these future leaders are able to build scalable, technology-driven solutions to address our future challenges. This is exactly the kind of impact we strive to cultivate at SIPA.”

The SIPA Public Policy Challenge Grant Program is produced in collaboration with Columbia Entrepreneurship.