These Three BIG IdeaBounce Finalists Are Headed For WashU Olin’s ‘Shark Tank’

A mushroom-sourced supplement startup.

A savvy solution to those pesky paywalls you encounter to read valuable content on the web.

A way to insure your glasses never get smudged.

The student entrepreneurs behind these three new business ideas are the finalists in this year’s BIG IdeaBounce® powered by Poets&Quants. The pitch competition, sponsored by the Olin Business School at Washington University, drew 130 entrants from 10 countries and more than 60 universities. The three finalists, narrowed from an earlier list of 14, will be competing against each other for the $50,000 top prize before a panel of judges at Olin. The competition will be streamed live on April 26th at noon EST (register here to see the event in a special broadcast).

THE BIG IDEABOUNCE FINALISTS: FROM BABSON, WHARTON & THE UNIVERSITY OF LETHBRIDGE

They include Unsmudgeable, founded by a team of Babson College students who have created a permanent anti-smudge eyewear lens coating for a lifetime of clear vision; Keye, created by a pair of Wharton MBA founders who have thought up a universal pass that unlocks access to expensive subscriptions from digital news sites with paywalls, and Mycos Supplements, founded by a group of Canadian students who have discovered a way to extract vitamins and metabolites with medicinal value from different mushrooms for daily supplements.

The finalists reflect the wide range of business ideas that poured into the competition from all over the world. But they also are representative of what Doug Villhard, academic director for entrepreneurship at Washington University, says are of superb storytelling and a deep commitment to the ideas by the student entrepreneurs. “The students are not just trying some thing out but are really committed to it,” says Villhard. “You see a higher energy around the ideas and it appears that more of them are doing customer discovery and that makes the founder speak from the perspective of the customer and those are the folks that win.”

Just watch the video pitches by the finalists to see how well their ideas are presented.

SUCCESSFUL TWO-MINUTE PITCHES THAT ARE COMPELLING AND CONVINCING

Swarna Shiv, a current student at Babson College who will graduate this May, starts her pitch with a personal touch. “You might notice I am wearing glasses today which is something I don’t like doing because they get smudged so frequently,” she the founder of Unsmudgeable. “I’ve been wearing glasses for the past 14 years and in all this time I have not found a way to permanently prevent these smudges.”

She then goes on to explain how her team came up with a way to prevent those smudges, noting that the startup has done the market research to show a need for the service and has already licensed its technology to two eyeglass manufacturers. Throughout the pitch, she is animated, dynamic and utterly persuasive.

Or consider Keyes Co-Founder Paolo Fornasini, who along with his co-founder Rohan Parikh, who will earn his MBA from Wharton this year. In his two-minute video presentation, he makes a compelling yet succinct case for the product the pair have come up with. “We have all been through the pain of being sent an article by a friend, only to hit a paywall,” says Fornasini directly into the camera. “Then you either ignore the article, fumble through an annoying sign-up process, or maybe you get a free trial that you end up getting charged for later. That is what is keeping 80 million students, young professionals and freelancers from contributing more to the digital subscription economy which is growing by 15% a year.”

He then estimates that 95% of the users on paywall sites go un-monetized by content providers, a fact that leaves about $17 billion in potential revenues on the table. Keye has built a single website and browser extension which allows a user to access the web content and streaming services without having to create additional accounts by buying credits at $5 a month. “Our users get content flexibility and our partners are happy because they get to grow their revenue and we give them leads to convert to new subscribers,” adds Fornasini.

BIG IDEABOUNCE FINALISTS WILL FACE A PANEL OF JUDGES IN ST. LOUIS

And then there is the pitch from Gregory Robinson, who earned his bachelor’s and graduate degrees in physiology and pharmacology at Western University in Canada. Currently, he’s both a PhD candidate at the University of Lethbridge and an MBA student at the University of Illinois’ Gies College of Business. He strongly believes that the medicinal benefits of mushrooms are both underappreciated and underutilized. Enter Mycos Biotech, a startup he founded with others in early 2022. He brings a high-powered team with him, including Chief Medical Officer Marta Gerasymchuk who has an MD and specialized in internal medicine as well as two PhD degrees in pathophysiology, and Marketing Director Lean Barker who earned her BS and Master of Management degrees at the University of Calgary.

In his video pitch, Robinson is the quintessential professional, using graphics and data to tell the story of the business opportunity before him. He notes that the supplements represent a $1.4 trillion worldwide industry. Mycos’ mushroom-sourced products are smartly packaged and address a variety of health issues that differentiate them from anything else on the supplements market.

With their selection as the finalists, all three founders and their teams will now face the ultimate ‘Shark Tank’-like test, flying to St. Louis to face three judges, all successful entrepreneurs in their own right, and a camera crew to capture the event. The BIG IdeaBounce competition commemorates WashU Olin’s fourth-consecutive year as the #1 MBA program for entrepreneurship. Poets&Quants will also soon reveal the startup team with the most votes as P&Q’s Choice Award. The competition was open to all undergraduate, graduate and prospective students interested in a graduate business degree.

DON’T MISS: THESE 14 STARTUP IDEAS MADE THE CUT FOR WASHU OLIN’S BIG IDEABOUNCE $50K TOP PRIZE or WHERE ARE THEY NOW: PEDALING INTO THE FUTURE WITH PEDALCELL