The annual Y Prize—co-sponsored by Penn Engineering, Wharton’s Mack Institute, Wharton Entrepreneurship and the Penn Center for Innovation—awarded top honors to the Wharton and Penn Engineering student founders of Fermento, a system to speed up the fermentation process in beer production by up to nine times while maintaining alcohol quality and composition at an industrial scale, leading to substantial cost reductions. The Fermento team, consisting of Siddharth Shah, Shashwata Narain and Alexander David, selected microfluidic fabrication technology developed by David Issadore’s lab as the basis for a technological solution to this problem.

The Y Prize gives students the chance to show how Penn technology can be used in creating a compelling and viable product. Fermento won $10,000 and the right to commercialize their application of Penn-owned biomedical engineering technology. The prize was awarded at the fourth annual Y-Prize Grand Finale in January.