When David Beck enrolled in the MBA program at Georgia Tech, he already knew he wanted to start his own business right after graduation in 2005. He just didn't know what kind.

Taking full advantage of the Institute’s entrepreneurial environment to find the right business opportunity, he worked on commercializing promising sensor technology developed by a mechanical engineering PhD student through the TI:GER®program.

Winning first place in the Most Fundable category in the 2005 Georgia Tech Business Plan Competition confirmed to Beck and his colleagues that they were on the right track with their company, Sentrinsic. The award goes to the team deemed most ready to enter the marketplace by the entrepreneurs and venture capitalists judging the competition.

Since then, Sentrinsic has made considerable headway in the marketplace with the position sensors it designs, manufactures, and sells for industrial automation and robotics. Position sensors are essential for automated systems, guiding moving parts, such as robotic arms, where they need to go.

Sentrinsic’s patent-pending technology offers customers high precision sensors at half the cost of competing technologies, says COO Beck, who runs with the company with CEO Mike Orndorff, MBA ’05 and CTO Haihong Zhu, PhD ’05. “Simply put, our products are better, smaller, and less expensive than anything else out there,” he adds.

More and more companies are taking notice of Sentrinsic, which is growing fast in the Advanced Technology Development Center, Tech’s startup incubator. The company’s increasing list of customers includes a Fortune 500 company, Parker-Hannifin, and Sentrinsic continues to attract investors and win grants from organizations like the Georgia Research Alliance.

“TI:GER®was a great help in navigating the university commercialization process, identifying and attracting the people we needed to get on board to make it happen, and understanding intellectual property issues,” Beck says.