A plan for cleaning wastewater with ultraviolet light won the $15,000 first prize in the annual Big Bang! Business Plan Competition at UC Davis on May 20.

The funding will help students complete a prototype of the novel technology, which will be tested first at UC Davis’ wastewater treatment facility. The system has the potential to replace chlorine as a disinfectant in swimming pools and hot tubs as well.

A $5,000 second prize went to a plan for a back-injury consulting firm. And a $3,000 “people’s choice” award — selected by audience vote — went to a start-up that markets a “rainskirt” made of recycled plastic bottles.

“This was the toughest deliberation in the history of this competition,” said Roger Akers, a Sacramento venture capitalist who estimates that he has evaluated some 10,000 business plans in his 30-year career. Akers was one of seven volunteer judges who determined the top Big Bang! winners.

The Big Bang! competition, founded in 2000 by students at the UC Davis Graduate School of Management, has become one of the best-known business plan competitions on the West Coast.

Competitors vie not just for the chance to win cash, but also for the opportunity to develop their ideas and business plans with the help of investors, intellectual property attorneys and business leaders. Teams must include at least one UC Davis student, alumnus or staff or faculty member.

‘Change the world’

With this year’s prizes, UC Davis Big Bang! has awarded a total of $166,000 to 27 promising student-initiated projects.

Previous Big Bang! winners and finalists have gone on to form such companies as Vinperfect, based in Davis, which markets a high-tech wine stopper; Bloo Solar, based in West Sacramento, which sells low-cost solar energy technology; and VisualCalc in El Dorado Hills, a management software firm.

“You get to change the world,” Scott Lenet, founder and managing director of DFJ Frontier, an early stage technology venture capital fund, said at the Wednesday night event. Lenet helped to judge the competition.

“We’re kind of in an economic mess right now,” Lenet remarked. “And it won’t be the large companies that get us out of it. It’s going to be the successful entrepreneurs.”

MBA students run the competition without any financial support from the university. This year’s student co-chairs were Julia Barg and Adelina Ratner.

The 2009 competition opened last fall with a field of 19 business plan submissions. The field was whittled down in preliminary judging rounds to five finalist teams. Those five teams presented their plans to volunteer judges during a closed-door session on the afternoon of May 20, and to the public later that evening.

UltraV, the winning business concept, relies on technology developed by Bassam Younis, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Davis.

The UC Davis Energy Efficiency Center and the Center for Entrepreneurship both helped to connect him with students in engineering and management.

Those connections led to UltraV. Elisabetta Lambertini, a Ph.D. student in engineering who serves as chief technology officer of the incipient startup. MBA candidates Mananya Chansanchai and James Bui are vice president of development and vice president of sales and marketing, respectively.

UltraV will work with David Phillips, director of facilities management, and Michael Fan, senior engineer, to test the technology at the UC Davis wastewater treatment facility.

The students applied for a $150,000 grant from the California Energy Commission to complete a prototype for the campus test. They also filed an application for a patent.