When the Galant Challenge launched at UVA McIntire in 2012, it was essentially a homegrown pitch competition not unlike TV’s “Shark Tank.” It invited UVA-affiliated founders to present early-stage ventures to a panel of accomplished alumni investors, with the opportunity to raise real capital. Over more than a decade, that model made it one of the largest collegiate funding vehicles in the country, deploying more than $55 million into emerging companies.
In 2026, the Challenge now looks different. Held in late April in McIntire’s new Shumway Hall, the Challenge has grown well beyond its original format into the Galant Challenge Program; less a contest than a convening of founders and funders, the program serves as a catalyst for investment that increasingly flows through a network of UVA-connected venture capitalists. Yet for all the capital in the room, the Galant Showcase, a pitching event that takes place in April each year, stands as the public capstone of a year of classroom efforts and student-led due diligence inside the Galant Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
“The Showcase celebrates the result of a year of hard work from the many stakeholders who make the program run: faculty and staff at McIntire, our students, and, of course, the startups and founders themselves,” Galant Center Director Abby Fifer Mandell says of the event.
Galant Center Director Abby Fifer Mandell
That work begins in the classroom. Long before the finalists take the stage, the event is anchored by the Center’s educational mission: In the weeks leading up to it, teams of McIntire and Darden students work alongside alumni investors to conduct due diligence on the ventures under consideration. Those real-world reps complement the educational opportunities at UVA, including the Commerce School’s Entrepreneurship Minor and Darden’s i.Lab Incubator. On the day of the event itself, attendees tour a gallery of student startups and sit in on a venture capital panel. This year’s call for pitches drew more than 80 applications—the most in program history—which were reviewed by five undergraduate Commerce majors and nine Darden students. The top 10 were then shown to more than 30 alumni venture capital professionals.
Much of that educational core bears the imprint of Eric Martin, the Center’s co-founder, longtime director and one of the people behind the launching of the Challenge. Martin built programs including the Entrepreneurship Capstone and Managing Innovation courses and mentored a generation of student founders. Martin stepped back as the Showcase’s host in 2026 and was honored with an award recognizing his many contributions at this year’s event.
At the heart of the evolution of the Challenge Program is the UVA VC Collective, the two-year-old by-invitation network of UVA alumni in venture capital that now spans more than 35 organizations representing several billion dollars of available capital. Chaired by David Zusman (McIntire ’97), Managing Partner of GoPoint Ventures, the Collective gives alumni investors a forum to share deals, collaborate on diligence, and bring both promising companies and their own capital to Charlottesville.
“Reception of the UVA VC Collective from its members and the University has been incredible,” says Zusman. “We have been adding new UVA alumni every month, members are sharing high-quality deals along with their industry insights, and we’re finding new ways to give back to UVA through enhanced student engagement or recruitment opportunities.”
For Galant Center Founder Mark Galant (McIntire ’80), the Collective represents the next chapter of a program built to draw more interest and investment into UVA innovation by alumni funders.
Center Founder Mark Galant (right) with Eric Martin, who led the Center for the vast majority of time since its founding in 2008. Martin stepped back as the Showcase’s host in 2026 and was honored with an award recognizing his many contributions at this year’s event.
Funding for Showcase companies often arrives from several sources at once, including individual firms within the VC Collective, Galant himself, others on the reviewer panel, and longstanding partner CAV Angels, co-founded and led by longtime McIntire Advisory Board member Rich Diemer (McIntire ’80). A continuing supporter of the Challenge, though distinct from the VC Collective, CAV Angels, the nonprofit network of more than 500 alumni, faculty, parents, and students, has invested over $30 million in 66 companies in its first decade, including co-investments in past Galant finalists.
No 2026 result illustrates the new model better than Buzz Solutions. Founder and CEO Kaitlyn Albertoli, a Forbes 30 Under 30 designee, returned to the Showcase for a second round after first receiving Galant investment in a pre-Series A raise. This time, Buzz announced an oversubscribed $20 million Series A round led by S3 Ventures, with significant follow-on participation from Zusman’s GoPoint Ventures.
The deal traces back to the VC Collective: GoPoint Ventures, who led Buzz’s previous rounds, introduced the company to the VC Collective. New Collective member Will Omberg (McIntire ‘21), Senior Associate at S3 Ventures, collaborated on diligence and ultimately led the A round, and several other Collective members also invested smaller amounts, bringing the total from the VC Collective to about $18 of the $20 million raised.
Buzz’s momentum made it an easy company to back. Its PowerAI platform uses AI to turn drone and camera imagery into actionable intelligence for utilities such as Dominion Energy and American Electric Power, and the company tripled its customer count while growing revenue 400% last year. So, while Buzz’s founders were not UVA alumni, its UVA story is an investor story made possible by the UVA VC Collective and the Galant Challenge.
Of course, the Showcase still spotlights founders from the University’s own rich venture community. Terra Kaffe’s Sahand Dilmaghani (McIntire ’13), who first applied in the Challenge’s inaugural year, returned as a full-time founder, with prior raises topping $20 million. Charlottesville-based Built Biotechnologies, led by 2008 Engineering alumnus George McArthur, is raising an $8 million seed round. Hardshell, co-founded by recent graduate Andrew Schoka (Engineering ’26, Darden ’26), is a CAV Angels investee and currently in discussions with members of the VC Collective as part of their seed raise. All three of these founders’ firms have already received $100,000 each in funding from the Challenge. Niobium, with 2022 Darden graduate Bobby MacKinnon among its leadership, is raising a $50 million Series A. The Galant Challenge helped initiate a partnership between Niobium and Hardshell that has already built an application for Al-based credit card fraud detection on encrypted data that was recently highlighted in a Google Private AI blog post.
“The Challenge put us in front of people we never would have met otherwise,” says Hardshell’s Schoka. “A lot of the investor conversations we’re in today started with introductions from that event. Hardshell’s partnership with our friends at Niobium came directly out of the unique format of the Challenge.”
“One of my primary goals for the Galant Center was to build a UVA ecosystem around entrepreneurship that would serve both students and alumni, as well as help draw future students to UVA,” says Galant. “Creating an alumni VC community to share deals, putting companies together to collaborate on projects, and meaningfully funding startups show it’s become a reality.”
If the Galant Challenge began as a contest to fund UVA’s best ideas, the 2026 Showcase showed how far it has traveled: a convening where a single introduction through its network of alumni investors can help catalyze a $20 million round for a company like Buzz while still putting the University’s own founders on stage. While Fifer Mandell describes the Galant Center as “home to UVA’s disruptors, rebels, visionaries and changemakers,” it is also increasingly where those visionaries meet to find the capital to drive their ideas.
