18 Teams Selected for Classroom Portion of the 19th Annual Global New Venture Challenge

Published on Friday, January 30, 2026

From Chicago, Hong Kong, and London, 18 teams are advancing to the classroom portion of the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation’s 2026 Global New Venture Challenge (GNVC).

Now in its 19th year, 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. The program brings together founders across global campuses to develop and scale early-stage ventures while balancing the demands of work, study, and entrepreneurship.

Each year, more than 80 coaches, judges, panelists, and guest speakers participate in the GNVC, providing teams with mentorship, industry insight, and rigorous feedback as they refine their ideas and prepare for market entry.

“This year’s GNVC teams showcases the impressive strength of entrepreneurial thinking across Booth’s global Executive MBA community,” said Alyssa Rapp, faculty lead for the Global New Venture Challenge and adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. “This next phase is designed to provide a structured environment to develop their entrepreneurial ideas, apply strategic frameworks, and to think critically about how to de-risk and maximize potential success of their entrepreneurial venture.”

Chicago Cohort

401 Capital Partners // 401 Capital Partners is an active investment management firm founded at Chicago Booth in Gleacher Center room 401. Its flagship strategy, Graham, is a quantitative value algorithm offering transparent, research-driven exposure to public equities. In preliminary testing, Graham has delivered roughly three times the S&P 500’s returns.
BRB // BRB is a compact reset and recovery pod designed for people operating in high-demand work or home routines. It provides short, structured recovery by controlling sound, light, airflow, and posture, creating the conditions required for reliable cognitive reset in minutes. BRB addresses burnout without requiring long breaks, training or behavioral change.
KLIQ Ventures // Two out of three patients who see a surgeon for a joint replacement don’t need one — they need a different doctor entirely. Kliq screens and quickly matches patients to the right doctor at the right time, before wasting visits. Joint replacements first, orthopedics next, then all of medicine.
MixMatch // MixMatch helps adults form lasting friendships in new or unfamiliar cities by placing them into small, curated groups that meet repeatedly in person at local venues. By designing for continuity rather than one-off events, MixMatch converts existing social spending into durable relationships through a subscription-based model.
Morton Labs // Morton Labs is a new venture specializing in computational science for fusion energy research. Its mission is to reduce the time and cost required to design, validate, and optimize fusion systems by building and maintaining the digital infrastructure that connects legacy and next-generation physics codes into usable, well-validated multi-physics workflows.
National Trade Campus Systems, Inc. (DBA TradeCampus) // National TradeCampus Systems, Inc. (DBA TradeCampus) partners with community colleges to create college-owned, skilled trades schools, housed in purpose-built facilities. It delivers an end-to-end platform — from feasibility and site strategy through facility construction and opening, curriculum frameworks, and post opening support enabling colleges to expand workforce education beyond traditional degree pathways.
Phoenix Beacon // Phoenix Beacon is a patented green-light rescue technology that cuts through smoke, fog, water, and collapsed-building debris, enabling faster, clearer search-and-rescue operations. Licensed to OEM searchlight manufacturers, it provides a defensible competitive edge and accelerates adoption globally across disaster response, defense, and emergency-service markets.

Hong Kong Cohort

Aura Interactive // Aura Interactive develops an AI-powered interactive character platform, transforming licensed IP into physical companions that educate children and engage collectors through conversation and personalized interaction.
Eventfull // Eventfull is a comprehensive event planning platform for personal occasions, community building, and corporate events. Launching in Asia with plans for global expansion, it combines essential tools into one user-friendly experience, streamlining workflows and empowering organizers to efficiently plan, promote, and scale events with precision and ease.
FINNA (Financial Intelligence Network Navigation Assistant) // FINNA is a fintech-enabled holistic wealth management platform for China’s mass affluent born 1975-1995 facing unprecedented multi-generational obligations. Its adaptive AI engine, combining Markov Monte Carlo and deep learning, quantifies specific shortfalls, prescribes integrated solutions, and provides lifelong support — replacing fragmented extraction-based advice with transparent, technology-scaled planning at democratized cost.
LeGaxy // LeGaxy is building an AI-driven platform for intentional legacy building that transforms static family constitutions into living, interactive systems. Embedded within family offices, private banks, and insurance firms, the platform enables intergenerational communication, preserves family values and decision frameworks, reduces continuity risk, and strengthens client acquisition, engagement, and long-term retention.
Lumana // Lumana is a privacy-first, non-intrusive mmWave + thermal sensing system for the aged-care sector that detects unwitnessed falls, night-time risks, and hygiene-related events without cameras or wearables. It delivers continuous, room-level monitoring to support safer and more dignified aging in senior living communities and home-health environments.
The Cut Tournament // The Cut is a national, app-based amateur golf tournament that lets everyday golfers compete locally while playing in a structured national competition. Players submit verified scores from their home clubs over six weeks, with weekly eliminations, national leaderboards, live finals, and meaningful prizes.

London Cohort

Flex // Flex is an AI-powered running coach that builds training plans around real-life constraints – not the other way around. Unlike rigid apps that assume perfect weeks, Flex starts with actual availability, adapts proactively when life intervenes, and honestly tells you what goals are achievable.
Mosaic Technologies // Mosaic is a next-generation wealth tech platform offering investment solutions designed to perform during market dislocations and protect against downside risk. Using a proprietary systematic macro investment engine, Mosaic delivers a diversifying investment service that can be tailored to individual portfolios with a customer-centric, performance-based pricing model.
Phinorm // Phinorm provides a “featherlight” threat classification software for edge defense systems. Its adaptive, distribution-free algorithm enables millisecond detection of drone swarms on existing battlefield hardware. It demonstrated reduced compute load, removing the need for GPUs. Its proof of concept demonstrated 75.5% error reduction, offering instant upgrades to radar systems without hardware changes.
Pulsera // Pulsera is a behavior change platform for post-acute heart failure care that ensures evidence-based care actually happens after hospital discharge. By automating patient engagement, monitoring adherence, and escalating risk only when needed, Pulsera reduces preventable readmissions while lowering care management labor burden for health systems.
Steady // Steady is an enterprise SaaS intelligence platform that transforms wearable health signals into short-term, predictive insights on human readiness and performance risk. Built for safety- and performance-critical organizations, Steady enables institutions to anticipate risk windows, evaluate trade-offs, and make better operational decisions before incidents occur.

The GNVC is designed to meet the unique schedule needs of Chicago Booth Executive MBA students. Students who are accepted into the program 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 semifinals 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.