IPB University LKST Successfully Hosts Pitching Battle Hackathon PRIME STeP 2025
IPB University, through its Science and Technology Park (LKST), successfully hosted the Pitching Battle Hackathon (11/9) at the Startup Center Building, IPB Taman Kencana Campus, Bogor.
The PRIME STeP 2025 Hackathon is a technology-based business idea competition aimed at university students and lecturers in Indonesia. This competition challenges participants to create solutions to various strategic issues such as food security and agrotechnology, the environment, renewable energy, and other relevant fields.
The Chairperson of LKST IPB University, Prof Erika B Laconi, encouraged and expressed her appreciation to the student participants of the program. “We always strive to enable students and alumni to create job opportunities,” she said.
She also said that teams that were not selected this time should not be discouraged because there are still many other opportunities to participate in, one of which is the PRIME STeP program with the Asian Development Bank (ADB).
“Thank you also to the reviewers, Prof Rokhani, Dr Burhanudin, Dr Asep Taryana, and Deva Primadia Almada, MSi, for attending this event. The ten best and selected teams will become innovative, resilient, and sustainable startups,” continued Prof Erika.
Deva Primadia Almada, Assistant for Business Incubation at LKST IPB University, also explained the mechanism for the pitching battle. Each team was given the opportunity to present their pitch deck for five minutes, followed by a question and answer session and assessment by the reviewers.
“The assessment covers the team’s capacity, pitching performance, product innovation, market potential, and product or business feasibility,” continued Deva.
The Pitching Battle Hackathon was attended by a total of 22 student teams from various universities in Bogor City, 19 teams from IPB University, 2 teams from Pakuan University, and 1 team from Ibnu Khaldun University. Each team consisted of 3-5 students from various majors and one supervising lecturer.
This event was part of a series of Hackathon programs. Prior to this, a bootcamp and coaching sessions were conducted for the participating students. This event served as a decisive point for selecting the 10 best pre-startup teams to receive a grant worth 35 million rupiah for the initial development of their products/businesses. It is hoped that these 10 teams will eventually become startups that can participate in the next stage of the incubation program. (*/Rz)(IAAS/RWA)
