Winning Venture at eMerge Americas’ Competition Includes Two Babson Alumni

April 21, 2022

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Two Babson College alumni are part of the winning venture at the eMerge Americas Startup Showcase x Startup Showdown Grand Finale.

Gisela Hackmann ’12, marketing specialist at Togal.AI

Togal.AI, an artificial intelligence construction company, won the grand prize—a $420,000 investment—at the international startup competition Tuesday at eMerge Americas, the first and largest tech conference in Miami. Chief revenue officer Dexter Bachelder ’93 and marketing specialist Gisela Hackmann ’12 are part of Togal.AI’s winning team.

Togal.AI uses machine learning to automatically calculate the square footage of plans, labeling of rooms and walls, and updates of construction blueprints. For big projects, which can be hundreds of pages long, this compresses weeks of work into mere seconds.

“Togal was honored to win the eMerge startup competition out of thousands of companies,” Hackmann and Bachelder wrote in a statement. “We are proud to be utilizing the Babson education as part of the Togal.AI team.”

Kevin O’Leary, celebrity investor and star of “Shark Tank,” was one of four judges at the showdown, which featured 100 startups. One of the five finalists was TicketRev, founded by Jason Shatsky ’21, who also won Babson College’s ePitch competition earlier in the day.

Posted in Babson Briefs

Tagged Alumni, Startups

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By John Crawford

Senior Journalist

John Crawford

A writer for Babson Thought & Action and the Babson Magazine, John Crawford has been telling the College’s entrepreneurial story for more than 15 years. Assignments for Babson have taken him from Rwanda to El Salvador, from the sweet-smelling factory of a Pennsylvania candy maker, to the stately Atlanta headquarters of an NFL owner, to the bustling office of a New York City fashion designer. Beyond his work for Babson, he has written articles and essays for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Notre Dame Magazine, The Good Men Project, and other publications. He can be found on Twitter, @crawfordwriter, where he tweets about climate change.

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