The New Venture Competition is an annual competition sponsored by the Rock Center for Entrepreneurship and Social Enterprise Initiative open to all students and alumni who are launching new business and social impact ventures. This year, climate and sustainability were topics covered by 22 entrants, and we wanted to highlight the contestants from this year’s competition who are developing a wide range of ventures to address climate change.
2024 Business Track Winner:
Crop Diagnostix - Brandon Chi (MBA 2024), Joseph Swift, Amitesh Pratap - Redefining precision agriculture through AI-powered, genetic insights.
Watch Crop Diagnostix at the 2024 New Venture Competition.
2024 Social Enterprise Track Winner:
Solara - Rea Savla (MBA 2024), Vishesh Mehta - Providing an on-demand solar irrigation service to Indian farmers, increasing their access to affordable, reliable, and clean irrigation.
Watch Solara at the 2024 New Venture Competition.
2024 Social Enterprise Track Crowd Favorite:
SeaCycle - Hande Ilhan (MBA 2025), Jakob Spiess (MBA 2025) - Pioneering sustainable biopolymer production.
2024 Tough Technology Prize Winner:
RESILIFT - Maiky Iberkleid Szainrok (MBA 2023), Marcus Landers (MBA 2023) - There are 15 million homes in the US with a one in four chance of total asset loss due to flooding, RESILIFT will end that threat to American Housing.
PARTICIPANTS - BUSINESS TRACK
AgX - Maxwell Leef (MBA 2025), Callum Taylor, Sam Aubin - AgX smart cattle tags serve farmers with data on individual cow health and behavior, empowering farmers and providing peace of mind as they make better high-value livestock management decisions on breeding, disease, and feed programs.
EnergAI - Aron Sass (MBA 2025), Balint Varga - EnergAI delivers an AI-powered platform for optimizing home energy use, enabling cost-effective EV charging and reducing grid stress by smart load shifting.
First Element Energy - Michael Alexander (MBA 2024), Charlie Mitchell (MBA 2024) - First Element Energy is a natural hydrogen exploration and production company that will provide the low cost, low carbon intensity fuel of the future.
Integrated Dynamics - Jake Sweed (MBA 2024), Henry Markarian, Niranjan Kulkarni - Turning food waste into green hydrogen using hyperthermophile archaea.
Latent - Rourke Pattullo (MBA 2025), Tom Walkinshaw (MBA 2025) - Enabling electric vehicle owners to leverage their EV’s battery to profit from buying and selling electricity, increasing grid reliability, and increasing the utilization of renewable energy.
NextWave Trades - Tuneer De (MBA 2025) - NextWave Trades empowers a new generation of professionals with the skills and knowledge to excel in the evolving green economy through specialized, hands-on trade training programs.
Searchlight - Ben Kallas (MBA 2024) - Searchlight will enable western countries to address vulnerabilities in their critical mineral supply chains by providing on-the-ground information, financial coordination, and logistics.
SUMS - Katie Waugh (MBA 2024) - SUMS accelerates adoption of sustainable materials in the fashion industry by pooling demand for those materials, unlocking economies of scale.
VoltLink - Lucienne Oyer (MBA 2024) - VoltLink is a platform that simplifies utility’s coordination of their contractors, increasing efficiency on both sides and accelerating the energy transition.
PARTICIPANTS - SOCIAL ENTERPRISE TRACK
Lokale - Farand Anugerah (MBA 2025) - Address stunting, empower community with organic fruit farming, and meet urban demand sustainably.
NetaCarbon - Grace Lam (MBA 2024), Mar Velasco - Democratizing access to the carbon market for businesses, especially those in the Global South.
Orisa AI - Sana Mojarradi (MBA 2025) - Orisa AI is the copilot for emergency response managers in times of crisis
Rehydrate - Jake Sortor (MBA 2025), Connor Ratcliffe (MBA 2024), Justin Kan, Caroline Sabatt (MBA 2025) - Rehydrate: Transforming water access for DoD, disaster relief, and global communities plagued by water insecurity
Bagh-e - Mujtaba Khalid (HKS), Hasan Nomani, Ehtisham Hammed - Bagh-e is an app-based solution that provides digital credit to small-scale farmers in a partnership model. Bagh-e also gives them a personalized geo-tagged best practices schedule to help increase the per-acre yield of their lands. Therefore, the two major outcomes from Bagh-e are increased financial inclusion and per-acre yields for small-scale farmers. This is an important issue because up to 25% of GDPs of developing countries is attributable to small-scale farming. Eventually, we want to use AI to automate the financing process and evolve into the world's first digital Agri bank.
Intrapreneurs with Purpose - Lingling Jiang, Margot Zuckerman (MBA 2024) - At Intrapreneurs with Purpose, we aim to cultivate and support 10k+ social intrapreneurs to drive sustainability and equity initiatives within their corporations. We have completed our first pilot program supporting 21 fellows from 11 countries through capacity building and community engagement, through collaboration with leading Harvard faculties.
MiCampo - Marcus Stromeyer (MBA 2024), Julian Saavedra - MiCampo is an AI-powered ranch management solution for Latin America.
NEAT: Niger Meat - Sharif Nami (MBA 2024), Mouin Chreif (MBA 2024), Ali Akhdar - First export oriented abattoir in Niger, a vertically integrated net-zero Meat export business in the country
The Humanity Company - Jobelle Gacuya (GSE) - The Humanity Company is a social enterprise using innovative business models to end poverty through impactful products, consulting services, and social venture investments.