UNB entrepreneurs win big in Breakthru Competition

The New Brunswick Foundation’s Breakthru Competition has awarded its top prize of nearly $375,000 to Pfera, a rapid birth prediction management tool for pregnant mares. The technology can be used through a smartphone and can determine when a mare will go into labour down to the hour. The technology was developed by Lisa Pfister, a Univ of New Brunswick graduate with degrees in engineering and technology management and entrepreneurship. Runner-up awards worth $180,000 each were made to SomaDetect, an agri-tech firm with a method for assessing fat content in cows using light scattering developed by Nicolas Clermont and WEnTech, a cloud-based software — developed by Amir Akbari and Forough Motasemi — for determining the best options for converting various waste types into energy.