Soroosh Hedayati, founder of Micro Safari in Tucson, shows how to use the mobile microscope to look at the microorganisms that live in the safari ecosystem. The Micro Safari Kit contains food, a syringe, the mobile microscope and the Safari slide.
Micro safari kits are a variant of the old ant farm and combine self-contained micro-ecosystems with a microscope that can be attached to your cell phone.
Like many companies, Tucson entrepreneur Soroosh Hedayati was forced to make a tough fulcrum out of his burgeoning museum exhibits business last year when COVID-19 all but shut down the attraction industry.
Hedayati now wants to set up a spin-off business with Micro Safari, which offers kits that combine self-contained micro-ecosystems with the microscopy of cell phones in a new variant of the old ant farm.
And he’s ready to get his business going after winning the main stage competition at IdeaFunding, an annual Tucson business pitch event that happens virtually on April 15th.
Hedayati won $ 10,000 in cash and a year of free incubation at the University of Arizona Center for Innovation worth $ 10,000. Micro Safari also won $ 5,000 for winning in the Consumer Goods category.
Other IdeaFunding Prize winners included several University of Arizona technology spin-offs – Paramium Technologies, Metfora, and TheraCea Pharma – as well as several members of the UA Center for Innovation’s incubator. Others were founded by UA alumni or students.
IdeaFunding, a “shark tank” -style pitch competition that has been running in Tucson for more than 20 years, went virtual this year and was streamed live by Arizona FORGE at Roy Place due to pandemic concerns.
Adopted in 2014 by the nonprofit entrepreneurship group Startup Tucson, it was a main event of the Tenwest Impact Festival, a 10-day series of events that was canceled this year and postponed to 2022.
.
Comments are closed.