Yellow Card Financial, from Auburn University and winner of several other national pitch competitions, took home the $10,000 top prize at UGA’s Next Top Entrepreneur Competition on April 12 in Athens.

Yellow Card Financial offers a platform seeking to make cryptocurrencies quickly accessible without verification issues and delays associated with cryptocurrency exchange. In January, Yellow Card won the Global Student Entrepreneurship U.S. East Regionals in Atlanta, advancing the team to the national competition. 

Eight teams in all — including four from UGA — vied for top honors April 12 at Hotel Indigo in downtown Athens.

Mechanodontics, a startup of students from UCLA and Johns Hopkins University who developed a new dental braces system, took second place.

DermTest, a team from UGA whose business promotes a mobile application that uses machine learning algorithms to aid in early diagnosis of melanoma, took third. 

The Next Top Entrepreneur Competition is open to student startup teams throughout the country, and during the event the eight finalists pitched their existing business plans or ideas in front of a live audience and a panel of judges. This is the third year of the National Next Top Entrepreneur Pitch Contest.

The five other finalists were:

• Moon Rekt, a team of students from Georgia Tech and UGA, who created a progressive web app designed to help people organize and track their cryptocurrencies on any device. 

• NeuroPress, a team of students from the University of Alabama, which plans to license NASA technology to measure intracranial pressure to better detect and treat concussions.

• PuppyFax, from UGA, which developed a platform designed to deter puppy mills and irresponsible breeders by matching informed buyers with reputable breeders. PuppyFax was the winner of the 2017 UGA Idea Accelerator.

• Cosmic Delivery, also from UGA, which seeks to provide customers with a quicker and more friendly option of food delivery through technological improvements to the systems used by current food delivery services. 

• Lapovations, a team of students from the University of Arkansas, which is developing a platform of products that improve minimally invasive surgery.