CU Denver Chemistry Professor Scott Reed (second from left) wins first place in AI pitch competition
CU Denver Chemistry Professor Scott Reed won first place in the AI pitch competition hosted with support from the Colorado SBDC serving Aurora-South Metro.
The award includes $25,000 in AWS support to help advance ChemIllusion, a chemistry-native AI platform created by Scott Reed, a faculty member in the Department of Chemistry.
ChemIllusion helps students, educators, researchers, and scientific teams create molecular structures, chemistry figures, graphical abstracts, teaching materials, and scientific visuals using AI tools designed specifically for chemistry workflows. The platform is currently live at ChemIllusion.com and is preparing for expanded education pilots and continued development of AI-assisted chemistry drawing, visual communication, and teaching workflows.
The core technical challenge behind ChemIllusion is not simply adding large language models to chemistry workflows. Chemistry requires accuracy, structure, and validation. A molecular drawing, reaction scheme, graphical abstract, or lecture notes need to have correct structures to be useful. Chat based AI hallucinates chemical structures that are outside of its training data. ChemIllusion fixes that and brings AI into the familiar environment chemists already trust: a molecular drawing canvas. Users can draw molecules by hand or create them via chat or voice all while keeping the structures chemically valid and editable. From that canvas, ChemIllusion can help create images, videos, slide decks, reaction schemes and custom tutorials for students.
“We are grateful to the Colorado SBDC serving Aurora-South Metro, AWS, Futran Solutions, BSide Capital, the City of Englewood, and the judges for recognizing ChemIllusion’s potential,” Reed said. “This support will help us make chemistry-specific AI tools more useful, reliable, and accessible for the students, teachers, and scientists who need them.”
The AWS award will support expanded infrastructure, broader access to advanced model-powered tools, and improved scalability for classrooms, labs, and scientific teams. Reed plans to use the support to expand free trials, strengthen cloud deployment, and continue improving the chemistry-aware AI harness that powers ChemIllusion.
The competition was judged by a four-member panel representing Amazon AWS, Futran Solutions, Aurora-South Metro SBDC, and BSide Capital.