Eastern Startup Team Takes Third at Dempsey Competition

Eastern’s Universal Extrusion Solutions (UES), a startup business supported by The Eagles Accelerator program, placed third out of 174 teams at the 2025 Dempsey Startup Competition, hosted by the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business.

This marks the first time an EWU team has reached the top four in the UW competition, now in its 28th year.

Judges awarded $87,500 to early-stage student startups during the event, with the Eastern team earning a total of $12,500 in prize funding to support the development and testing of their “minimum viable” product.

The UES team, which includes business and engineering students, also received the Best Sustainability Innovation – Big Picture Award for their early-stage creation, dubbed the PolyForge™. The product helps 3D-printer users lower costs and reduce plastic waste by producing filaments from raw or recycled plastic pellets.

Team members include Kevin Sweet, a 23-year-old from Los Angeles, California who is enrolled in EWU’s Master of Business Administration program. Sweet said the original pitch idea stemmed from an idea he developed after seeing how much waste was produced at his undergraduate university’s 3D printing lab. Sweet, who earned a mechanical engineering degree from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Arizona, developed the concept with Devin Cole, a fellow engineering student, when they were both undergraduate students.

At Eastern, Sweet recruited Devin’s brother Dustin Cole, a 20-year-old mechanical engineering student from Federal Way, Washington, to further develop the idea. The team also received communications and marketing help from Crystal Cruz, a 24-year-old who attends a community college in Los Angeles, California.

Sweet and his team credit EWU’s Ideation Lab with additional support. EWU’s Philip Appel, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Eagle Startup Center, had them practice their pitch repeatedly before participating in competitions at Washington State University and UW.

“Being able to pitch to an audience of students was invaluable because it gave me that real-world experience of pitching to random people – and also getting their input on if the business [pitch] makes sense the first time hearing it,” Sweet said.

The team also gave a shoutout to their mentors and supporters at EWU. They are now planning to pitch their product to the Spokane Angel Alliance, an investor group focused on emerging companies in Eastern Washington, Idaho and Montana.

“We are also partnering with the EWU polymer testing lab so we can test a lot of the filament that we’re making,” Sweet said. “So, that’s really exciting that we are going to be working with engineering professors on campus to test material we’ve made with our device.”

**The photo included in this story is used courtesy of Matt Hagen, UW Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship.