EVANSTON, Ill., May 27, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Por Adela, a smart fleet management startup, is the winning team at VentureCat, Northwestern University’s annual student startup competition powered by the Levy Institute for Entrepreneurial Practice and co-sponsored by Lanny and Sharon Martin. The top 25 semifinalist teams competed for more than $300,000 in non-dilutive prize money on May 26, 2021.
VentureCat hosted 30 distinguished venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and industry experts as judges from Boston to Denver to Silicon Valley to evaluate startups from five industry tracks: Business Products and Services, Consumer Products and Services, Energy and Sustainability, Life Sciences and Medical Innovations, and Social Impact. The winner of each track in the semifinals, and one wildcard team, competed for the finals’ prizes:
- Business Products and Services: Por Adela
- Grand prize winner
- Por Adela is the smart factoring solution for truckers that will help small and medium sized truckers grow in LATAM.
- Student: Jaime Tabachnick, Kellogg School, ’22
- Social Impact: Equal Opportunity Book Box
- Second place winner
- Equal Opportunity Book Box is a subscription service for diverse children’s books that donates one book to an underserved child for every book sold.
- Students: Jacob Jordan, SESP ’20 and School of Professional Studies, ’21; Stephanie Shin, Medill School, ’21; Anthony Cruz, McCormick School, ’22
- Wild Card: springrose
- Third place winner
- springrose designs adaptive, attractive intimates for women with upper mobility or dexterity challenges, such as arthritis, stroke paralysis, nerve damage, shoulder injuries.
- Students: Nicole Cuervo, Kellogg and McCormick ’22; Natalie Coletta, Kellogg School, ’22; Courtney Weldon, Kellogg and McCormick ’21; Hans Rojas, Kellogg School ’21
- Consumer Products and Services: LUKH
- Audience favorite (via text messaging)
- LUKH is an online rental service dedicated to making South Asian fashion and culture accessible in the United States.
- Students: Karen Desai, Katie Andrew, Alisha Daga, Kellogg School, ’22
- Energy and Sustainability: Agroco
- Agroco is a modular farming solution that aspires to improve global food production by bridging the gap between conventional agriculture and controlled-environment farms.
- Students: Lorenzo Hernandez, Ben Sych, Evan Gorski, McCormick School of Engineering, ’21
- Life Sciences and Medical Innovations: Agora Health, LLC
- Agora Health is a digital disease management platform for patients with chronic gastrointestinal conditions.
- Students: Sam Jactel, Kellogg School, ’21
“I’m always thrilled to see the unique and innovative startup businesses that are developed at Northwestern and showcased at VentureCat. The pitch competition is more than just winning the coveted prize money; it also includes mentoring, coaching, design services and more,” said Larry Levy, managing partner, Levy Family Partners, and longtime trustee at Northwestern University. “The founders finish the VentureCat competition with valuable advice on how to grow or refine their early-stage businesses – and past VentureCat participants have raised more than $500 million since 2014, in part thanks to the learnings at Northwestern’s VentureCat.”
VentureCat is a university-wide competition and open to students at all levels of study. The competition is a collaborative effort between The Kellogg School of Management, The Garage, the Donald Pritzker Entrepreneurship Law Center and The Farley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation.
“I’m ecstatic to win this year’s VentureCat school-wide competition at Northwestern University,” said Jaime Tabachnick, MBA candidate at Kellogg School. “Por Adela aims to be a smart factoring solution for small to medium sized truckers to help them grow in Latin America. Following the VentureCat win, we’re planning to invest this money into developing more automation for our platform so that we’ll focus our resources on growth and customer acquisition to then scale exponentially.”
More about VentureCat:
VentureCat is powered by the Levy Institute for Entrepreneurial Practice and co-sponsored by Lanny and Sharon Martin. Lanny Martin is chairman of the board of trustees at Northwestern University and earned his bachelors in 1968 and his JD from Northwestern University School of Law in 1973. Larry Levy is also a longtime trustee and received his MBA from Kellogg School in 1968. He and his wife Carol Levy, also a Northwestern alum, established the Levy Institute at Kellogg School in 2003.
VentureCat differs from other pitch competitions by offering non-dilutive capital prize money and featuring five distinct tracks: Business Products and Services, Consumer Products and Services, Energy and Sustainability, Life Sciences and Medical Innovations, and Social Impact. Startups in these tracks compete in private semifinals with a panel of industry experts as judges, and then the top team in each track moves on to compete in finals with a panel of prominent investors and entrepreneurs. Prior to the competition, the teams completed a four-week pitch prep program that provided mentorship, graphic design, pitch coaching and more.
SOURCE Northwestern University
