Phase II Teams Selected for the 17th Annual Global New Venture Challenge

22 teams from across the world are advancing to Phase II of the Polsky Center’s 2024 Global New Venture Challenge (GNVC).

The GNVC is the global track of the New Venture Challenge, the University of Chicago’s signature startup accelerator, and supports Chicago Booth Executive MBA students worldwide. More than 80 coaches, judges, panelists, and guest speakers participate in the GNVC each year.

The 22 teams are broken up into three cohorts in Hong Kong, London, and Chicago. The Phase II teams are:

Chicago Cohort

• Autism GPT // Autism GPT aim to provide speech therapy for children with autism by harnessing generative AI. It is developing a digital speech therapist that offers personalized, engaging, and cost-effective speech therapy. Autism GPT’s approach combines AI with the Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition model, ensuring a sustainable revenue model and unlimited accessibility to speech therapy.
• BuildWise // BuildWise is a community development-centered construction marketplace and project management platform with a mission to make redevelopment projects accessible to everyday entrepreneurs and support investments in revitalization, recovery, and growth. BuildWise solves inefficiencies and provides entrepreneurs, contractors, and capital-providers a solution to execute a project from conception to completion.
• Buy-Ex // Buy-Ex revolutionizes the car purchasing experience by leveraging traditional & Gen AI by enabling a reverse-auction process to change the way dealers and customers interact. It offers a transparent and competitive bidding platform to optimize the customer buying experience and provide sellers with tangible benefits to increase their bottom line.
• BYPASS // BYPASS aims to reduce the burden of cardiovascular disease on patients, physicians, and health systems in India. BYPASS is a virtual clinic that delivers effective, evidence-based cardiac preventive care to Indians at high risk of cardiovascular disease from the comfort of their homes.
• ChatGPT Leads // ChatGPT Leads is a media buying, call center, lead generation, qualification, and intake AI-powered platform. It builds multi-channel campaigns that bring marketing qualified leads to small and medium-sized businesses in B2C verticals through hyper-personalized, 24/7 outreach, data, and partnerships to fine-tune LLMs and its entire pipeline to lastly securitize it all out.
• DialyLink // DialyLink revolutionizes end-stage renal disease care with home dialysis, enhancing patient lives. Launching in Houston, its disruptive model, emphasizing convenience and cost-effectiveness, targets a $11 billion U.S. market. Backed by strategic partnerships and a skilled team, DialyLink aims to transform and streamline the dialysis experience for end-stage renal disease patients.
• Gropilot.ai // Gropilot.ai offers an AI-driven farming solution, empowering farmers and cooperatives with actionable insights for yield improvement, financial services access, and sustainability. This user-friendly platform seamlessly integrates with existing tools, enhancing agricultural decision-making and creating new revenue opportunities.
• Investable // Investable markets and operates a digital application that creates personalized, goal-based investment plans, connects them to a customer’s payroll account, and programmatically purchases micro shares of value-based investments each pay period. Investable is convenient, affordable and leverages the power of compounding to decrease risk and increase returns.
• SpeakFluent // SpeakFluent is “the Grammarly for spoken English”, a SaaS company led by non-native English speakers. Its mission is to increase non-native English speaking college students’ confidence in their verbal communication skills. Its app allows users to record themselves and receive real-time AI-generated feedback on their speech cadence, pronunciation, and more.

Hong Kong Cohort

• Action3 // Action3 is an environmental tech company that helps corporations optimize their supply chain decarbonization strategies and meet their net zero goals with the use of its one-stop solution platform that measures, reports, and analyzes scope 3 emissions across upstream supply chains.
• Babel // Babel is envisioned to be a building operation platform-as-a-service for connecting building operators and vendors. Babel connects building managers and vendors for more effective and cost-efficient facility management by providing a one-stop repair and procurement platform for building managers and vendors.
• Bamboo Wellness // Bamboo Wellness is a pioneering online platform offering virtual medical consultations and authentic Japanese healthcare products to Chinese tourists, harnessing Japan’s medical credibility to ensure uninterrupted access and trust in a post-pandemic landscape.
• Genius Platform // Genius is a low code software application development platform helping firms build enterprise grade software, leveraging engineers with basic programming skills. Prebuilt configurable digital bricks help quickly digitize manual business processes with no vendor dependency. Genius empowers your software engineers with required technical capability for your digital needs.
• HireRx // HireRX is a complete hiring solution that transforms the way companies hire and retain talent. It automates fundamental, but overlooked, hiring processes enabling companies to build flexible hiring architecture and effective screening methodology. With HireRx, hiring becomes a strategic tool to drive business growth and solve problems.
• Marinas Bio // Marinas Bio produces genuine seafood delicacies in a clean environment through cellular agriculture. It focuses on traditional superfoods such as caviar and roe while addressing conservation, quality, and consistency challenges in their existing supply chains. Marinas Bio serves discerning customers seeking a healthy, luxurious, and memorable culinary experience.
• Zootron // Zootron is a data storage company that develops and manufactures high capacity and high speed microSD memory storage cards.

London Cohort

• Abamee Properties // Abamee Properties is a real estate company aiming to close the student housing gap in France by acquiring and renovating discounted properties near universities, turning them into affordable and all-inclusive housing primarily for foreign students.
• Close2Home // Close2Home offers the next generation of employee benefit for higher engagement and retention. It is an online platform that guides employees, which are first-time homebuyers, in their down payment-saving journey with accurate target setting and science-based motivational guidance.
• Earth Labs // Earth Labs is designing a monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) technology using AI to monitor and accredit carbon offset projects for their quality. It also connects the carbon credit suppliers to the buyers and enhances the transparency and trustworthiness of carbon credit supply chain through a unified AI/Blockchain platform and marketplace.
• Ella // Ella aims to provide an AI-powered assistant to elevate the end-to-end traveler experience. Imagine WhatsApp, Google Maps, Booking.com, and Trip Advisor in a single app that not only plans and books for you, but also connects you with the right services in real-time throughout your stay.
• Flowgreens // Flowgreens is a U.K.-based tech company that was conceived to support people’s well-being by helping them alleviate stress by combining technology and sustainable, natural solutions. Its goal is to make it easier for people to relax and destress without additional time investment.
• FoundersDD.xyz // FoundersDD.xyz is transforming financial due diligence from an expensive consultant-led exercise to an automated white-label product for cloud accounting platforms and banks. It’s like building an analyst’s financial view of a business in seconds. It democratizes access to hugely valuable financial insight to help small to medium-sized businesses grow.

The GNVC is designed to meet the unique schedule needs of Chicago Booth Executive MBA students. Students who are accepted into the program will take a class that is taught by one of the Polsky Center’s entrepreneurship faculty – learning how to take their idea from ideation to implementation and exploring the entrepreneurial journey.

Each campus – Chicago, London, and Hong Kong – will host its own semi-finals event, and the top teams across all campuses will be invited to participate in the GNVC Finals, where teams pitch to a world-class panel of investors and entrepreneurs. Prizes in the form of cash, legal services, and professional consulting are awarded.