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.

Why the package matters

Three very different bets — civil infrastructure sensing, enterprise AI agents, sports hardware — cleared the same provincial filter and leave public product URLs behind. That is the usable signal for anyone watching whether NBIF's early funnel still produces companies you can click, not just pitch decks. The diligence after the stage is the harder part; the websites are already there.

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