KinderMate, TAINA, and Tusome! Advance to GNVC Finals

Published on Saturday, February 25, 2017

On February 25, MBA teams competed at the semi-finals of the 2017 Global New Venture Challenge (GNVC) in London, England. Waverly Deutsch, clinical professor of entrepreneurship at Chicago Booth and the professor for the Global New Venture Challenge (GNVC), travelled to the United Kingdom where the teams presented their business plans to a panel of distinguished judges and venture capitalists.

In the end, KinderMate, TAINA, and Tusome! emerged victorious and were selected by the judges to advance to the GNVC finals.

KinderMate develops and markets a set of cross-platform mobile and web applications designed as a safe and engaging space for children to play, explore, and learn online. A virtual, animated, speaking “friend” will help children discover content carefully curated within the KinderMate community.

TAINA is an early stage start-up with a mission to help financial institutions comply with their regulatory obligations while saving costs and cutting risk of fines. TAINA software will automate certain labor-intensive compliance functions which currently require manual intervention. It will achieve this by leveraging the power of machine learning.

Tusome! (“Let’s study!” in Swahili) is an online education platform targeted at secondary education in sub-Saharan Africa, with an initial focus on Kenya and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

These three companies from London will face off against the winners of the Chicago and Hong Kong semi-finals on March 16 at the 2017 GNVC finals.

Now in its tenth year, the GNVC is an expansion of the top-ranked Edward L. Kaplan, ’71, New Venture Challenge, and is designed exclusively for Chicago Booth’s executive MBA students. It debuted in 2008 to accommodate the growing entrepreneurial aspirations of Booth’s executive MBA students on each of its three global campuses—North America, Europe, and Asia. The program is run by the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation in collaboration with the Executive MBA program at Chicago Booth.