A team pitching a new company built around a veterinary diagnostic product was the big winner April 10 during the 13th annual MBA Business Plan Competition.
Rian Kelsay, Miles Naughton, Huiying Huang and William Hohenschuh developed and presented their integrated business plan for Lasso Metrics, whose technology centers around a low-cost, paper chip designed as a platform for lateral flow assays.
The technology figures to allow various tests to be done at once, saving a veterinary clinic both time and money. Company founders are Vince Remcho of the Department of Chemistry and Shay Bracha and Jan Medlock of the College of Veterinary Medicine.
“We put in a lot of work, so it’s nice to see it turn out like this,” said Kelsay, whose team placed first in three of the four business plan competition categories en route to being named the overall champion among the five teams, made up of students in the MBA program’s commercialization track.
The competition culminated Friday evening with the Elevator Pitch and Shark Tank portion of the contest, held in Austin Hall’s Stirek Auditorium.
The pitch requires a member of each team to sum up the team’s plan to a potential investor in 55 seconds, roughly five floors’ worth of travel in an elevator. In the Shark Tank, team members work together to present to a group of possible investors and answer their questions.
The Lasso Metrics team triumphed in Elevator Pitch and Shark Tank category, followed by the one-person KW Associates team of Lauren West, and the DulsEnergy team of Andrew Maroon, Sijia Guo, Cody White and Mary Fedorowicz. That category carried a first-place prize of $500 to be shared by the team members.
The other categories were venture viability, technical merit and artistic merit, each with a $1,000 first prize. Results were as follows:
Venture viability: 1, Lasso Metrics; 2 DulsEnergy, whose plan centered around the sea vegetable dulse as a low-cost gourmet food; 3, Ink Shade Films. Ink Shade’s plan was built on a light-blocking, variable tinting for office and hotel windows and the team consisted of Yunfeng Wu, Laura Schaudt, Brian Serbu and Daniel Hough.
Technical merit: 1, KW Associates, whose technology is described as being “like an MRI for industrial processes”; 2, Lasso Metrics; 3, Ink Shade Films.
Artistic merit: 1, Lasso Metrics; 2, DulsEnergy; 3, Ink Shade Films.
In the overall standings, DulsEnergy finished second to Lasso Metrics, and Inkshade was third.
“It’s mind boggling,” said Naughton of his Lasso Metrics team’s performance in the IBP Competition. “To see it all the way from beginning to completion is really satisfying.”
