Twenty-Four More Business Plan Competitions

Baldwin Louie — Mon, 05 Jun 2000 15:00:00 -0700

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Contest: Bain & Company Start-Up Challenge
Winner: Leasing Point [from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business]
Team: Phil Pfirrmann, Andrea Roberts, Jeff Scolnick
Contact: jeff@leasingpoint.com
Prize: $50,000 and support from Bain's in-house incubator.
Funding: Seeking initial financing.
Description: The management consulting firm invited teams from seven top B-schools to compete in its first national business plan competition. The winner, Leasing Point, aims to be a leading online exchange for the leasing and financing of business equipment. The team, which includes a University of Chicago MBA and several equipment-leasing industry veterans, is targeting companies that lease manufacturing and transportation equipment costing more than $1 million, such as printing presses, airplanes and rail cars. The company already has a CEO, CTO and an advisory board, and it is currently building a Web site and negotiating with investors for its first round of financing.

Contest: Carnegie Mellon University, University of Pittsburgh and Duquesne University -- EnterPrize
Winner: SmartOps [from Carnegie Mellon]
Team: Michael Abowd, Vivek Khemka, Ian Lomax, Faustino Santana, Sridhar Tayur, Marty Wagner
Contact: stayur@cyrus.andrew.cmu.edu
Prize: $60,000
Funding: Closed $1 million in angel funding.
Description: Application service providers were big in this year's business plan contests. SmartOps is an ASP that is developing tactical planning software for managing multistage supply chains. Translated, that means it intends to help corporations orchestrate the complicated task of getting raw materials from suppliers at the correct time and delivering finished goods to customers when and where they're needed. Led by Sridhar Tayur, an operations and manufacturing professor at Carnegie Mellon's Graduate School of Industrial Administration, the team is in the final stages of developing its software, has three customers, is hiring executives and is talking to venture capital firms about additional funding.

Contest: Columbia University Graduate School of Business, Outrageous Business Plan Competition
Winner: Newlines Airways
Team: Julian Cook
Contact: jc@newlines.com
Prize: $5,000
Funding: Raised $1.8 million in seed money and is looking to raise another $35 million to $40 million this summer.
Description: Newlines is a London-based airline that expects to take off in January 2001 and will offer premium- and business-class flights between London and New York. Planes will be equipped with the latest Internet and electronic gadgets "in order to enable the business traveler to use his time efficiently while traveling," according to the company's business plan.

Contest: Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, Startup Challenge
Winner: OmnipreSense
Team: Vamsee Pamula, Michael Pollack, Vijay Srinivasen, Jeremy Usher
Contact: jeremyu@yahoo.com
Prize: $30,000
Funding: Currently refining business plan before seeking venture funding.
Description: OmnipreSense is building technology that melds microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) with wireless technology to connect laptops, digital assistants and Internet-enabled cell phones with peripheral devices. MEMS are chips with both electronic and mechanical functions. This dual functionality allows these chips to "interact with the physical world in ways [that chips haven't before]," says cofounder Usher. The startup is still building product prototypes and is looking for an incubator or office space that will keep it close to MEMS manufacturers in North Carolina's Research Triangle Park.

Contest: Garage.com's PlanEdu
Winner: Quicksilver Genomics [from the University of California at San Francisco]
Team: Rey Banatao, Jose Haresco, Sean Mooney, Sandra Waugh
Contact: reyban@cgl.ucsf.edu
Prize: $150,000
Funding: Not available
Description: Biotech companies won at least four of this year's business plan competitions. The richest purse went to Quicksilver Genomics, which won $150,000 for placing first in PLANedu, the inaugural contest held by online angel-investor network Garage.com. Led by a team of four Ph.D. candidates in medical information sciences, pharmaceutical chemistry and biophysics, Quicksilver Genomics aspires to build an application-service-provider platform to help researchers discover drugs based on human genome research. The startup says that by using its computing platform, pharmaceutical and other companies will be able to uncover lead compounds from unclassified gene sequences and turn them into patentable products more quickly.

Contest: Georgia Institute of Technology's DuPree College of Management, Business Plan Competition
Winner: B2Bfast.com
Team: Brian Fortner, Angela McCorkle, Adrienne Rollerson, Adam Schwartzberg, Jay Tramonte, Sarah Trout, Simon Yin
Contact: simonyin@excite.com
Prize: $500 and a spot in the school's Advanced Technology Development Center, an on-campus incubator.
Funding: Looking for $150,000 in seed financing.
Description: The startup is launching a Web marketplace for technology startups, other small businesses and their suppliers. Registered buyers set up a private page to view information on strategic partners and suppliers and to bid on merchandise and services. Likewise, vendor companies set up their own private pages to aggregate information about customers and make bids on contracts. The team expects to have a working prototype by July. Although competitors such as Onvia.com and BizBuyer.com have a substantial foothold in the market, B2Bfast.com believes that it can compete by charging suppliers only when they complete a sale, not when they submit a bid, which is the current practice.

Contest: Harvard Business School, Harvard Business Plan Contest
Winner: Bang Networks
Team: Sarah Boatman, Robert Dreyer, Robert Rosin, Tim Tuttle
Contact: info@bangnetworks.com
Prize: $10,000 in cash and $10,000 in professional services.
Funding: Near to closing first-round funding.
Description: Although Bang is keeping what it's doing under wraps, company officials will say they're building a distributed infrastructure network linked to a broadcast platform to give Internet media companies a "scalable, real-time content-delivery solution." The technology is ready to go, but the team won't say when the launch is expected to happen. Founders include Dreyer, an architect of the Pentium processor; Rosin, a member of the Harvard Business School class of 2000 and a former WebTV program manager at Sony; and Tuttle, an MIT Ph.D. who worked in the university's AI lab. "We've been literally inundated since winning the contest with VCs, people looking for jobs, old friends who saw us on CNN and even real estate agents." Rosin says.

Contest: London Business School, E-Posium business plan competition
Winner: Sibilance
Team: Rana Ganguli, Gregory Garson, Michael Smith
Contact: msmith@london.edu or www.sibilance.com
Prize: $18,200, incubation from E-start.com and technical support from Sun Microsystems.
Funding: Seeking first round of financing.
Description: Sibilance is a personal concierge service for European users of Internet-enabled cell phones and other wireless devices. According to the startup, the online concierge uses preferences from users and their friends, and editorial reviews, in order to recommend restaurants, clubs, bars and pubs. It also will dish up news, train schedules and customized advertising. The startup team includes veterans of Oracle and IBM.

Contest: Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition
Winner: EyeGen
Team: Kiril Alexandrov, Susan Bevers, Zoran Zdraveski
Contact: kiril@bostonbookreview.org or zzz@mit.edu
Prize: Winner receives $30,000.
Funding: Seeking $2.5 million in first-round funding.
Description: In its 11-year history, the MIT contest has spun off 50 companies, including Akamai and FireFly. EyeGen, a 3-month-old Cambridge, Mass.-based firm, was a finalist in two other national competitions. EyeGen is developing biomarker technology that renders biomolecules visible to the naked eye without exposing scientists to radiation and other health risks. EyeGen's scientists have found a way to use color to mark biomolecules, which the company says works better than accepted methods of radioactivity and fluorescent dyes. According to company officials, the markers could have multiple uses, such as tracking DNA damage during drug delivery. Since launching, the cofounders have refined their business plan, filed for patents and talked with potential customers. They're seeking seed financing to hire additional scientists and executives and to move into an office.

Contest: New York University Stern School of Business' $50K PLUS Business Plan Competition
Winner: Paperlink.com
Team: Maria Defino, Linda Dumas, Kevin Groff, Linda Lupold, Jeffrey Sander
Contact: kgroff@paperlink.com or www.paperlink.com
Prize: $35,000
Funding: Received $500,000 in seed money from individual investors and industry insiders. Currently raising first round of venture funding.
Description: The e-commerce infrastructure builder wants to help manufacturers and distributors of industrial supplies and branded and commodity paper products go online to compete with dot-coms invading the paper industry. The company, based in Somerset, N.J., and established in early 1999, has a slew of paper and technology industry veterans on staff, including Chairman Pike Peterson, former president of Unisource Worldwide, the country's top paper distributor, and Jeff Sanders, former CIO of Lucent's consumer products division. The company has two beta customers and expects to go live in the third quarter of this year.

Contest: UniversityAngels.com's $50,000 Business Plan Contest
Winner: InMeeting.com [from MIT]
Team: Kareem Benjamin, Kiran Choudary, Gregorio Cruz, Luke Fu, Joon Hor, Karim Hussein, Gregoire Landel, Christian Manasseh, Jaime Solari, Sanjeev Vadhavkar, Padmanabha Vedam
Contact: vada@mit.edu or www.inmeeting.com
Prize: $25,000
Funding: Received seed round and looking for first-round financing.
Description: InMeeting.com is a technology and services company that makes software to help automotive, aerospace, construction, defense and software firms create virtual design teams that function efficiently in multiple locations. InMeeting.com will offer products and consulting services for these collaborative virtual teams. The startup says these services and products will improve communication and reduce project length and cost, in comparison with what is currently available on the market.

Contest: UCLA's Anderson School of Management, Knapp Venture Plan Competition
Winner: Tergum Therapeutics
Team: Carrie Caulkins, Peter Nicholson
Contact: peter.nicholson.2000@anderson.ucla.edu
Prize: $10,000
Funding: Negotiating angel funding.
Description: Tergum Therapeutics is a research-stage company put together by Caulkins, a UCLA Ph.D. student in biomedical engineering, and Nicholson, a part-time Anderson MBA student and employee at Amgen. The startup is developing a nonsurgical treatment for degenerative disc diseases of the back.

Contest: University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, New Venture Challenge
Winner: The winner of the New Venture Challenge wasn't announced before press time. Competition finalists included: Sarvega Wireless, which proposes building customized wireless applications that companies can manage from existing wired applications; BoxDirect.com, an online exchange for the packaging industry; TheWireExchange.com, an online exchange for the wire and cable industry; UniverCite.com, a provider of supplementary online education for European and Latin American elementary and high school students; and Brightroom.com, a Web site for amateur athletes to buy and display photos from triathlons, marathons, bike races and other competitions.
Contact: Sarvega Wireless - John Chirapurath, mjchirap@gsb.uchicago.edu; BoxDirect.com - Brett Holland, brett@boxdirect.com; TheWireExchange.com - David Cole, mdcole2@gsb.uchicago.edu; UniverCite.com - Jose Dinis, j-dinis@uchicago.edu; Brightroom.com - Sol Kanthack, mskantha@gsb.uchicago.edu
Prize: A total of $50,000 to first, second and third-place teams.

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Contest: University of Michigan Business School's Business Plan Competition
Winners: Live e-Care, tied for first place with Eberwhite Data Technologies [see "Wiring the Rust Belt"]
Team: Dax Almendrax, Ken Hung, Jeff Russell
Contact: dax@umich.edu
Prize: $2,000 and a spot in E-lab, the business school's on-campus incubator, which provides a computer server, software and other technical services.
Funding: Closing a seed round, which could include an investment from Michigan's student-run Wolverine Venture Fund.
Description: Live e-Care is an outsourcer of live customer service for Internet retailers. Its workforce will be located in the Philippines, with sales and other functions handled from the U.S.

Contest: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Kenan-Flagler Business School, Venture Capital Investment Competition
Winner: A student investment team from Carnegie Mellon University
Team: Alex Churchill, Don Herzog, Matthew Levy, Rob Rice, Joe Woods
Contact: jwoods@andrew.cmu.edu
Prize: $10,000
Funding: Not applicable
Description: In North Carolina's contest, student teams assume the role of a venture investor and evaluate five real startups. The teams read business plans, sit through company presentations, choose which startup to finance and then defend their choice in front of a panel of venture capital judges. The winning team, from Carnegie Mellon, bested finalists from UCLA and from Emory University. Woods plans to join Mellon Ventures after graduation, other team members' post-grad plans were not available.

Contest: University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business
Winner: Channel IP
Team: Mark Galton, Dan Mader, Monique McCarroll, Scott Sorensen
Contact: info@channelip.com or www.channelip.com
Prize: Plaque
Funding: Currently seeking initial round of $2.5 million.
Description: The Los Angeles startup is launching an online auction marketplace where TV networks, cable operators and Webcasters can bid on satellite transponder bandwidth from satellite firms such as GlobeCAST, PanAmSat and Loral Space & Communications. Channel IP, which plans to make money by collecting transaction fees from bandwidth suppliers, is currently in residence at USC's EC2 Incubator and expects to launch its service this summer.

Contest: University of Texas at Austin, MOOT CORP 2000 World's Leading Business-Plan Competition, Internet
Winner: Global Risk Exchange [from Babson College]
Team: Andrew Berry, John Bowman, Matthew Flanagan, John Rubens
Contact: www.grx.com
Prize: $150,000 in hardware, software and services from Hewlett-Packard.
Funding: Received undisclosed seed financing; now raising first round of venture funding.
Description: The startup is launching a property-casualty commercial insurance exchange to help large corporations interact directly with insurers. Initially, the Providence, R.I.-based company will offer umbrella and excess liability coverage and eventually will expand to other coverage areas.

Contest: Vanderbilt University's Owen Graduate School of Management, National MBA e-Marketing Competition
Winner: Team Outbreak [from Harvard]
Team: Matt Kohler, Dan Lieberman, Laura Nissenbaum, Christa Sutphin, Tiffany Tan
Contact: dlieberman@mba2001.hbs.edu
Prize: $25,000
Funding: Not applicable
Description: Unlike traditional business-plan competitions, Vanderbilt's contest requires student teams to create an online marketing strategy for an existing brick-and-mortar company, which in this case is Wal-Mart. Team Outbreak, from the Harvard Business School, came up with the winning idea to install stations, which they called "E-Comvenience Centers," within existing Wal-Mart stores where customers who ordered merchandise from the company's Web site can pick up and pay for purchases, make changes to orders and make impulse purchases. Initially, online orders would be fulfilled from in-store merchandise and, eventually, through Wal-Mart distribution centers that would group-ship orders to individual stores for pick-up.

Contest: Wake Forest University's Babcock Graduate School of Management, Babcock/Eno River Capital Elevator Competition
Winner: Medamorphosis Pharmaceuticals [from the University of Georgia]
Team members: Elliot Altman, Ken Nations, Dave Preston, Harald Zeiss
Contact: nationsfamily@hotmail.com
Prize: An invitation to pitch the plan to Eno River Capital.
Funding: Seeking $3 million in first-round venture funding.
Description: In this first-of-its-kind contest, MBA students got two 28-floor elevator rides to pitch their business ideas to venture capitalists. Finalists had to make it through a follow-up 30-minute Q&A session. The University of Georgia team won with a plan for Medamorphosis, a development-stage company intent on commercializing peptide stabilizing-and-screening technology that was developed by Altman, director of the University of Georgia's Genetic Bioengineering Center. The company has applied for patents and is beginning tests on a peptide-based antibiotic that officials say kills staphylococcus bacteria more effectively than current antibiotics. The company operates out of the University of Georgia Biotechnology Incubator.

Contest: CollegeClub.com - Incorporate This! Business Plan Challenge
Winner: Outdoorsman.com, from Brigham Young University
Team members: Evan Child, Sean Finnigan, Brant Harnois, Ryan Nichols, Mike Phelps
Contact: mphlps@hotmail.com, www.outdoorsman.com
Prize: $10,000 and a trip for two team members to pitch to Campsix, a San Francisco incubator; $5,000 donation to Brigham Young University
Funding: Seeking financing.
Description: CollegeClub.com, a hub for college students, invited undergrads from across the country to submit plans that were judged by venture firms, incubators and consultants for viability, projected returns and other criteria. The winner, Orem, Utah-based Outdoorsman.com, is a newly launched Web site for outdoor enthusiasts, with a specialized search engine that lets people search by interest, region or type of business. The site also features classifieds, maps and weather reports.

Contest: Northeastern University $60K Business Plan Contest
Winner: LoanBright.com
Team members: Mark Barlow, David W. Black, Russell A. Straub
Contact: rastraub@loanbright.com, www.loanbright.com
Prize: $40,000
Funding: Seeking first round of venture financing
Description: LoanBright.com, led by former Northeastern professor Russell Straub, provides Web-based tools for the nation's 36,000 mortgage brokers. The tools include a ready-built Web site that mortgage brokers can use as their own, and a real-time mortgage interest rate survey that brokers can plug into their sites to generate sales leads. The year-old company has already accumulated 180 customers, generated first-year revenue of $450,000 and established an advisory board of industry veterans, including a former president of Ginnie Mae and a former vice chairman of Price Waterhouse. LoanBright, based in Dartmouth, Mass., is seeking venture funding to hire managers, complete software development and expand sales and marketing.

Contest: University of Michigan Business School - FuturTech Forum
Winner: NewsBiz
Team members: Brian Khoury, Ericka Lewis, Jim Mansfield, Scott Muldrow
Contact: jim@jimmansfield.com; www.newsbiz.com
Prize: A spot in E-lab, the business school's on-campus incubator that provides mainly computer server, software and other technical services
Funding: Currently seeking seed funding of $500,000 to $1 million.
Description: NewsBiz is creating a hub that reporters can use to find sources they need for stories and that public relations, university representatives and other media relations practitioners can use to pitch stories more accurately to journalists. The site also plans to offer some as-yet-unspecified commerce features. After a closed beta test, the startup's first product, NewsBizJournalist, is set to launch in mid-June. NewsBiz has contracted with an offshore Web developer to help build the site and is seeking seed capital to fund growth.

Contest: University of Virginia's Darden School - Business Plan Competition
Winner: Setagon Team members: Kiernan Conn, Kareen Looi
Contact: Not available
Prize: $10,000 and a spot in Darden's Progressive Incubator, including $15,000 in consulting and support services
Funding: Not available
Description: Setagon is a biotech startup that aspires to manufacture a stint to improve the success of an angioplasty for heart patients. In addition to keeping arterial passages open, the device delivers medication.

Contest: University of Washington Business Plan Competition
Winner: Aptelix
Team members: Christopher Ruff, Tim Sutton, Brad Thompson and Dan Aspleaf
Contact: chris@aptelix.com; www.aptelix.com
Prize: $30,000 plus a spot in the Washington Resource Foundation's state-run incubator and $1,500 in pro bono legal services
Funding: Seeking seed financing. Description: Wireless Internet service means you can use your cell phone to send e-mail or to shop. But did you ever try to punch a long message into your phone? No thanks. Three University of Washington class of 2000 MBAs and a friend have developed software that they say eliminates up to 90 percent of the keystrokes that go into sending e-mail over wireless devices. They started Aptelix to commercialize the program. Like police officers or CB radio fans who use a kind of verbal shorthand to exchange messages, Aptelix's founders are building a database of codes they say can be used to produce longer word strings and cut down keystrokes. They plan to launch the service with "a fun application for consumers" but envision a day when truckers, doctors, employee work groups and other people in specialized industries will use it with their own set of customized codes, says cofounder Chris Ruff. The company has tested its working prototype and is looking for seed funding.

Correction:
Previous coverage of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Venture Capital Investment Competition misidentified the student investment team member planning to join Mellon Ventures after graduation. The team member is Joe Woods.

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Twenty-Four More Business Plan Competitions