Infralytix Tops NBIF Breakthru as Urai AI and Mulli Swing Take Runner-Up Cheques

NBIF's resurrected breakthru pitch competition put real equity on stage again this spring. At the March live finale in Fredericton, Infralytix took the $100,000 grand prize — plus a $2,500 Viewer's Choice bump — while Urai AI Corp. and Mulli Swing Solutions each earned $50,000 runner-up investments, Entrevestor reported.

More than 140 entrepreneurs across 80 companies entered the 2026 edition, per NBIF and CBC. Breakthru had been the foundation's flagship founder funnel in the 2010s before fading in the pandemic; this year's reboot was meant to put capital and coaching back in front of early teams still building in New Brunswick.

Infralytix: bridges as truck scales

Founder Dr. Ethan MacLeod — a UNB postdoctoral researcher with roots in a Department of Transportation summer job — is commercializing bridge weigh-in-motion: small sensors on the underside of a span measure how the structure responds as vehicles cross, so owners can weigh traffic without pavement cuts or lane closures.

“We turn, you know, full-scale highway bridges into giant bathroom scales, basically,” MacLeod told CBC. He said the prize money goes toward shrinking lab hardware into a turnkey package and lining up pilots. Entrevestor later followed up on that hardware-and-pilots plan as the company's near-term focus.

Urai AI: agents that do the work

Shanthi Shanmugam and Vagmi Mudumbai of Urai AI took first runner-up for a programmable platform aimed at making AI agents simpler, cheaper, and easier to interpret — less chat widget, more in-product assistant that can finish a workflow. The company's public site at uraiai.com pitches embeddable assistants for SaaS teams, and the uraiai GitHub org publishes related tooling such as the in-app urai-chat-sdk.

Mulli Swing: grip pressure in real time

Brycen Munroe, Alex Khoshbakhtian, and Ethan Belliveau co-founded Mulli Swing Solutions around sensor hardware and an app that measure grip pressure and club motion during the swing, with haptic cues when the grip drifts. mulli.ca says the company is entering PGA of Canada coach pilot testing in 2026 — a prior MTME winner still climbing the product ladder.

What the cheques actually are

The wording in NBIF's own release is worth noticing: these are described as investments, not prizes. The foundation takes a position rather than handing over a grant, which makes breakthru a deal-sourcing mechanism dressed as a competition — a way to run structured diligence on 80 companies at once and put money into three of them, with the pitch event doing the filtering work that a partner's inbox does elsewhere.

That shapes who enters and what wins. The funnel ran from 140+ entrepreneurs across 80 companies down to five live pitches and three cheques, and the three that cleared share a trait that is easy to miss behind how different they look: each one had built something physical or deployable enough to demonstrate. Bridge sensors, a working agent platform with a public SDK, a sensor-and-app package entering coach pilots. Breakthru's reboot after its pandemic lapse was pitched as putting capital and coaching back in front of early teams; the selection suggests the bar was working hardware and shipped software rather than market size.

The harder part is what the stage cannot test. An equity cheque from a provincial foundation is patient money, but it is still money that needs the company to reach a round that values it higher. Infralytix has to turn lab hardware into a turnkey product and find bridge owners willing to be first; Urai is selling into the most crowded category in software; Mulli needs PGA of Canada coach pilots to convert. All three published a working URL, which is more than most pitch fields can say. None of that is the same as a customer.

Sources

• Infralytix Takes Top Prize at Breakthru — Entrevestor (March 23, 2026; prize amounts; founders; product blurbs)
• Infralytix Takes Top Prize at NBIF breakthru Live Finale — NBIF (80 companies / 140+ entrepreneurs; Viewer's Choice; runner-up descriptions)
• 100K-winning invention could help better understand N.B. bridge integrity — CBC (MacLeod quote; sensor approach; turnkey plans)
• Infralytix To Focus on Hardware, Pilots — Entrevestor (post-prize hardware roadmap)
• Infralytix / Urai AI / Mulli Swing — company sites