Fletcher x 4 at the Tufts $100K

This will be an exciting day for four teams of Fletcher students who are competing in the Tufts $100K New Ventures Competition.  Four teams out of only 18 to reach the finals, in fact!  The finalist teams will compete in three tracks — Social Impact; MedTech and Life Science; and General and High-Tech — with the pitching going on throughout the day.  The competing teams all include, but aren’t limited to, members of the Tufts community.

The Fletcher teams are:

Edkasa, Winner of the 2018 Fletcher D-Prize with $30,000 in cash and in-kind support services!
Team Members: Sohail Ali, F19; Bakhtawar Ali, F19; Fahad Tanveer; Annum Sadiq
Venture description: Pakistan has 15 million out of school secondary students.  Of those who are in school, nearly half do not graduate.  Using a live, virtual learning platform, EDKASA makes “rock star” teachers accessible to secondary students in Pakistan at an affordable cost.

M-tuma
Team Members: Faith Biegon, F18; Collins Sirmah, A16; Bryson Wong, A17
Venture description: Dukas, “Mom and Pop stores,” play a critical role in Kenya’s economy.  They supply roughly 70 percent of the country’s consumer goods and are often run by women or families.  These shop owners lack information on prices, travel long distances to wholesalers, and incur high transportation costs.  We are building an online system where shopkeepers can view prices and make orders.  We then aggregate orders from multiple shopkeepers and rely on third-party transporters to deliver goods utilizing economies of scale.  Shop keepers now know prices, get goods at their doorsteps, and save on transportation costs.

SunGLOW
Team Members: Jean Damascene Ndabirora, F18; Utsav Malay, F18; Subrahmanyam Pulipaka
Venture description: Sun GLOW provides practical online and offline training and classes for solar company personnel, vocational students, and university students.  These classes and the curriculum are custom designed for the Rwandan context.  Many companies win solar contracts without the correct expertise; this results in improper, inefficient design and faulty construction. SunGLOW provides the right training, understanding of design, as well as knowledge about climate financing the companies/students can access in Rwanda and internationally to launch their products/systems/ideas.  We ensure capacity building in one of the fastest growing sectors in East Africa, renewable energy.

Energeia,
Team Members: Zerin Osho, F18; Aditya Kaushik, F17; Keerthana Chandrashekhar, F16; Sookrit Malik, A17 F18
Venture description: Energeia will enable an affordable clean energy transition which will retrofit India’s inefficient transmission system and diesel generator powered infrastructure into a reliable smart microgrid powered by renewable energy and natural gas.  The company will upgrade the existing diesel generators into natural gas hybrids which are controlled and managed by an industrial IoT platform.  This platform will integrate intermittent sources of renewable energy, map consumption to highlight energy efficiency opportunities, and allow for a smooth integration into emission-trading systems in the future.

The winners will be named tomorrow (Thursday), though the “People’s Choice” winner will be selected today.

If you’d like to know more about Edkasa (the Fletcher D-Prize winner and one of today’s competitors), check out this conversation between Dean Bhaskar Chakravorti and Sohail Ali and Bakhtawar Ali.