$90,000 a day.

That’s how much one contractor can lose after a part fails. When a construction project grinds to a halt, it disrupts an entire chain. As assets sit idle, the ripple effect can mean suspending other projects or incurring financial penalties for delays. Problem is, different vendors specialize in different supplies — with varying degrees of reliability. These gaps create an opportunity for an all-in-one partner that can quickly procure quality parts and equipment.

Call it a question of supply and demand — where service, speed, and subject matter expertise serve as the differentiators. In this niche, you’ll find Gearflow making headway. It was co-founded in 2018 by Ben Preston, a 2021 MBA graduate of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. You can think of it as the largest online platform for ordering replacement parts and equipment, one designed around the urgency of shutdowns in construction. However, volume and variety aren’t Gearflow’s only advantages. Think of the company as a safety net and aggregator — a partner that offers peace of mind by vetting suppliers ahead of time while delivering the flexibility to order from multiple vendors at the same time.

Ben Preston, Gearflow (Northwestern Kellogg)

44 STARTUPS FROM 31 TOP BUSINESS SCHOOLS

Thus far Gearflow has raised $4.6 million dollars, including $3 million in its latest seed round In addition, the firm has closed a strategic partnership with CNH Industrial, a $30 billion dollar manufacturer. The partnership stems from the publicity that Gearflow enjoyed after winning the 2020 VentureCat competition at Northwestern. It also earned Preston an invitation to the Zell Fellows program, which provides coaching, networking, and support to student-launched ventures. For him, it would be difficult to slap a value on Kellogg’s impact on Gearflow’s success.

“The network proved to be more valuable than I could have ever anticipated,” Preston explains. “A large majority of our seed funding came from Kellogg alumni or by way of a connection made through the Kellogg network. More importantly, the key advisors we were able to gain along the way have been invaluable. We have been able to put together a world-class advisory board of well-known entrepreneurs, professors, and venture capitalists that would have been very challenging to do without Kellogg’s help.”

Gearflow is just one of the 44 student startups honored in P&Q’s 3rd annual “Most Disruptive MBA Startups.” This year, P&Q invited 40 business schools to submit nominations for MBA ventures. Ultimately, 31 programs participated, including Harvard Business School, Stanford GSB, Wharton School, INSEAD, MIT Sloan, and Chicago Booth. To qualify, the nomination was required to have at least one founding member from the MBA Class of 2021. The schools were also encouraged to select ventures with the “greatest potential for lasting beyond business school.”

RAKING IN THE INVESTMENTS

One sign of stability: funding. Take Glyphic Biotechnologies, a protein sequencing platform co-founded by Stanford MBA Joshua Yang. It has already banked $6.025 million in seed funding. Emile Learning, a startup launched by UCLA Anderson’s Michael Vilardo, has positioned itself as the “Netflix of Education.” And it’s investors, including Kleiner Perkins, have socked $5.4 million dollars into the firm. The result: the platform has enabled over 50,000 students to earn high school and college credits online — with the firm adding 51 employees in the past year alone. By the same token, INSEAD’s Capim and UCLA Anderson’s Emerald Necklace Investments have raised $2.45 million and $2.0 million dollars respectively, with the latter besting the S&P Index by over 50% since it was launched. In addition, the Wharton School’s Manuel Godoy and Bernardo Garcia have generated $2.6 million in funding for Félix, a platform that combines AI and Blockchain to make it easier for Latinos to send money overseas.

Manuel Godoy, Félix (Wharton School)

“Both of us are Latino immigrants and we have lived through the struggle of sending money to our home countries (Venezuela and Mexico respectively),” Godoy tells P&Q. “We are passionate about using our skills to build technology products that can provide immense value to people. We want to solve the remittances problem for the 25 million foreign born Latinos living in the US.”

Sebastian Rivas’ startup, Andes STR, has collected $1 million in seed funding. The Chicago Booth venture is ambitious in scope. A mix of real estate and tech, Andes STR helps investors identify and purchase short-term rentals, such as Airbnb properties, with the highest potential returns. The biggest differentiator: time savings. According to Rivas, his platform cuts the time spent on finding and buying properties from 200+ hours to 2 hours. And Andes STR even manages the property too. The idea for the venture came from banking peers, who were baffled by the “excruciating” process of buying these properties — one Rivas experienced first-hand.

“When sophisticated investors find it too hard to invest in something, that’s a hint that there is an opportunity there,” Rivas jokes. “It took me months to learn everything I needed to learn, a couple more months to find a decent deal, a couple of weeks to arrange the financing, and the whole process was super stressful. And then managing the property myself was simply impossible with the long hours I was working at the time. I handed the property off to a management company, but they did an awful job taking care of it: I literally got a call from the police at 2 a.m. on a Wednesday notifying me that there was a shooting in my apartment! At that point, I asked myself, “Why isn’t there a trustworthy company that can take care of everything for me?” I was not only fed up, but also motivated to help others so they don’t have to go through the same ordeal.”

ACCESS AND TRANSPARENCY

Ease and access is also at the heart of another Chicago Booth startup: ML Tech. Here, Leo Mindyuk co-founded a high-frequency trading platform, one that “connects experienced crypto researchers with institutional capital.” His goal is to “democratize” this emerging marketplace, so analysts can monetize their strategy at the speed of change.

Megan Murday, Metric (Harvard Business School),Rose Lincoln/Photographer

“Being an early researcher in crypto myself, I met a lot of people like me who run algorithmic trading strategies in crypto and wanted to get access to better infrastructure and capital to generate better investment returns. Meanwhile, through my work and professional connections, I realized that a lot of institutional investors wanted to get exposure to the emerging asset class, but it is difficult for them to find good researchers who can develop successful trading strategies in a transparent and secure environment. My co-founder and I came up with the idea to provide the infrastructure that will allow researchers to develop successful investment strategies, while solving the problems for institutional investors who want to get exposure to crypto.”

At Harvard Business School, Megan Murday has been bootstrapping Metric, a mix of investing, technology, and ESG. The goal, she says, is to furnish greater transparency in datasets beyond returns so investors can better “align sustainability, equity, and profitability.” To do this, she has developed a benchmarking platform that “recommend(s) ESG KPIs, managing targets, and providing data that can be used for LP reporting and portfolio management.” Murday’s idea stemmed from witnessing the limits of government and learning the value of incentives.

“Growing up in a deindustrialized South suburb of Chicago, I saw that systemic issues are multifaceted and do not serendipitously resolve themselves,” she writes. “I thought government would be the most straightforward solution, but a Georgetown policy degree and DC internships showed me that the public sector does not have the speed or scale to single-handedly address climate change or socioeconomic inequality.”

A TWIST ON DISRUPTIVE MODELS

ScholarSite, a Berkeley Haas startup, adds a twist to the usual education-technology connection. Rather than targeting traditional age students and educational institutions, ScholarSite sets its sites on professionals and businesses, bringing professors and experts to corporate meeting rooms and cube farms. Here, employees can engage in-person and online with these experts, who themselves enjoy added exposure to students outside the traditional classroom. Thus far, ScholarSite — which has received $800K in seed funding —has sold out two cohorts (140 seats) for Economics of Digital Platforms, a course taught by Haas Professor Steve Tadelis, a former economist with Amazon and eBay. More than that, these cohorts included employees from Google, Dropbox, and Upwork.

“We don’t believe leading experts (and their content) should only be accessible to those who can afford to attend elite schools,” explains Nicholas Rudder. “We feel that our background in academia, coupled with our experience in tech and media, makes us the perfect team to break down the ivory tower.”

Allison Cavasino (Left) and Natalie Poston (Right), Joylet (Georgetown McDonough)

Joylet is seeking to break down a different barrier. A baby gear rental firm, Joylet differentiates itself by offering flexible terms. As a result, new parents don’t have to buy expensive new items with short-term use that end up just taking up space or getting tossed out. Since its launch, Joylet has won first prize at two startup competitions, a tip of the hat to a sharing economy concept with serious staying power.

“[My partner and I] met in 2019, at a time in our lives when everyone around us was having babies,” writes Natalie Poston. “As we started to explore parenthood ourselves, it was obvious that the traditional model of baby gear ownership was outdated. Buying new gear for every baby can be wasteful – there’s already too much baby gear in circulation and oftentimes it can’t be donated, which means gear ends up in a landfill. We knew renting could not only be a more sustainable solution, it could reduce the stress parents felt about cost, reliability, storage, and choosing gear their child will like.”

PAGE 4: IN-DEPTH PROFILES OF 43 DISRUPTIVE MBA STARTUPS

Dr. C. Malcolm Roberson, Ultra EM (Virginia Darden)

FROM FOOD TO HEALTHCARE

MBAs are trained to identify industries and inefficiencies that are ripe for disruption, to go where no one is, to do what no one else wants, and to use models that no one else is considering. This year, there are several industries where disruptive startups clustered. Take healthcare. Here, Capim has carved out a ‘buy now pay later’ niche, reducing financial hurdles to make healthcare more accessible in Brazil. In contrast, Virginia Darden’s Ultra EM approaches healthcare from the student practitioner standpoint. An ultrasound simulator, it uses gaming principles to prepare medical students for the FAST exam, where physicians “screen blunt trauma patients for blood or abnormalities in the abdomen, pelvis, and chest.”  The solution dips into the experiences of Dr. C. Malcolm Roberson, a 2021 Darden MBA who was raised on gaming and understood its potential in a COVID-ridden world.

“Our simulator makes training and practicing of these ultrasound exams fun and engaging, testing users’ ability to acquire and interpret ultrasound images, as well as make appropriate medical decisions,” Roberson writes.

Food and beverage was another popular industry for MBAs to stake their claim. At Babson College, Aakash Shah started High Time Foods, which markets a plant-based chicken that has already passed its biggest test.

“We did a successful blind taste testing with my college mates,” Shah says. “They were invited for dinner and the participants included an Argentinian, a Japanese student and a Peruvian. They were different dishes using samples from my venture. Everyone was really complimenting the food and spoke about how the “chicken” was so tender and really tasty. That’s when I knew that this has potential.”

Kaitlyn Lo, Just Enough Wines (Michigan Ross)

WINE IN A CAN?

Ian Weng collected $60,000 in Euros when his startup, SPATULA, won this year’s INSEAD Venture Competition. Like many recent ideas, SPATULA began when Weng was stuck indoors during the pandemic lockdown. Unable to travel, he indulged in Picard’s gourmet frozen meals. And he wondered why his native Canada didn’t have similar chef-to-consumer frozen meals. Soon enough, his culinary empire was born. Kaitlyn Lo was inspired by the transition of spirits like seltzers to cans. A California native, Lo decided to apply this can concept to premium wine with Just Enough Wines. The result?

“Within one year of our initial launch, we sold out of our first vintages of the Chardonnay and Pinot Noir and are now on our second vintage of each,” she tells P&Q.

Growing up, Emily Mohr developed gluten and lactose intolerance. As a result, she missed out on her favorite foods: desserts. In response, she converted her favorite recipes to gluten- and dairy-free versions. As a Northwestern Kellogg MBA, she turned those recipes into a venture. She opened Nine Times Bakery, an artisan operation that didn’t let restrictions get in the way of taste and experience.

“In August, we supplied desserts for Butler University’s freshman orientation weekend. It was amazing to know that thousands of students were tasting our products and hopefully feeling a sense of comfort on their first weekend away at college.”

LIVING THE SUNGA LIFE

Laura Zwangzinger, Fit For Everybody (MIT Sloan)

Apparel was another area that MBAs found ripe for disruption. For two startups, the entry point was customization. That was the case for MIT Sloan’s Fit For Everybody, the Fashiontech creation from Laura Zwanziger, who is working to stockpile $2 million in seed funding by the end of the year. A womenswear firm, Fit For Everybody enables consumers to input a “flattering fit” that designers can use to make better sizing decisions for production. At Washington University’s Olin School — the top MBA entrepreneurship program in the world — second-years Lloyd Yates and Giorgio Guttilla partnered to start Tylmen Tech. After consumers enter their sizes online, Tylmen Tech accesses apparel that fits their sizing profile and tastes. And then there is Sunga Life, a startup paid for by Jeffrey Gum’s $55,000 Iraq re-enlistment bonus. Think of sungas as a form-fitting synthesis of shorts and speeds popularized on the beaches of Brazil. Gum has added a patriotic twist to sungas, including camo patterns, while expanding his line to training shorts and silkies. Thus far, Gum has notched two major accomplishments with his venture.

‘[I’m] on track for 1M+ revenue in 2021 while just using cash flow to grow as well as all the incredible veteran foundations I support with my company,” Gum explains. “The second is the incredible community I have built and all the celebrities, professional fighters, and veteran & fitness influencers who wear my brand just because they love what it represents.”

One strong motivator for the founders of this year’s MBA disruptive startups: environmental justice. Challenged at Columbia Business School to “Think bigger,” Martim de Mello developed Changing Room, a platform that enables users to track sustainability in their clothing purchases. In 2020, Ted McKlveen and Bav Roy, two Stanford GSB alumni, founded Verne, a zero-emission hydrogen storage system for heavy-duty shipping vehicles that boosts both vehicle range and payload capacity — a solution that has already attracted $1 million in seeding funding. Working in the slums, ESADE’s Keerthana Karunakaran witnessed how children would play alongside walls of plastic waste next to homes and along beaches. Working with Dr. Shantanu Bhowmik, she discovered a technology that enabled them to return plastic waste back to 95% of its original strength. Along with Akash Jayakumar, an aerospace engineering student, Karunakaran and Bhowmik launched RCube.

“We have a patented composite, a distributor network of over 28 in India, installations in 5 sites, and we are ready to launch our recycled plastic tiles into the market at a highly competitive price to mainstream tiles,” Karunakaran writes. “We are also cutting off carbon emissions that would’ve actually been around 10,000 times the weight of one tile. With expanding deals across two countries, we are presently launching into the market with a forecast of reaching a revenue of USD $250,000 by June 2022.”

MEETING THE UNIQUE NEEDS OF WOMEN

Linda Alvarez, Lavelle (Cornell Johnson)

Women’s needs have also sparked promising MBA startups. At Cornell, Linda Alvarez and Stephanie Schrauth started Levelle in response to 97.5% of sports nutrition products being designed around men’s physiology. As a result, many women struggle to process these products and enjoy their full benefits.

“Compounding the problem, many female athletes felt as though their bodies were the problem, rather than products on the market,” Alvarez notes. “Levelle aims to redesign current sports food products by focusing on the needs and preferences of the female athletes. Our first product is Levelle Set: our all natural, organic, vegan, no-sugar added, gluten-free endurance gel. Our formulation is designed to ease digestion while providing sustained fuel.”

Food isn’t the only area where female athletes lag behind their male counterparts. Mitchella Gilbert and Patrick Ayers, 2021 UCLA Anderson MBAs, started their OYA Femtech sportswear operation to combat apparel that traps sweat and creates health issues like chest rashes. Notably, Gilbert writes, OYA Femtech markets a signature product — “the first gynecologist-tested, athlete-approved, patent-pending legging for all kinds of moisture and leakages.”  Along the same lines, the company is prototyping stylish tops with the same benefits for a marketplace that’s clearly ready for change.

“It was clear how many millions of women were secretly dealing with sweat and moisture-related health issues, either out of shame or because there were few solutions,” Gilbert adds. “I became equal parts determined to fix sweat-related health issues and enraged. Why was no athleisure brand stepping up to help women be healthy AND look and feel beautiful at the same time?”

WHEN THE PRODUCT IS GOOD, THE RECOGNITION WILL COME

Emilie Mendes de Leon, Mystery City Games (IESE Business School)

Alas, many disruptive startups grow out of side hustles. IESE’s Emilie Mendes de Leon met her business partner, Geert Sillevis, during a rainy guided tour of Amsterdam. He suggested a treasure hunt, an idea that turned into Mystery City Games. Not only has this concept expanded to London, Barcelona, and Naples, but has also developed into an online phenomenon. Mystery City Games has even partnered with companies like McKinsey, Google, and Netflix for team-building excursions.  At Rice University, Sophie Randolph has become known as that “crazy gal” busy working on her startup. That’s ‘crazy’ as a fox — as the first-year has already raised $35,000 for Green Room.

“The goal is to become the backbone of the live music industry, providing a holistic set of business tools that make it so artists can spend more time doing what they love and venues can spend more time focusing on their customers and less time doing administrative work,” Randolph explains.

Speaking of nicknames, Lloyd Yates became known as the “tie guy” as an undergrad for selling ties around campus. That passion, which he channeled into his Tylmen startup, helped him be recognized as an Innovator Under 25 by the St. Louis Business Journal this fall.  That’s just one of the big achievements racked up by this year’s MBA entrepreneurs. Harvard Business School’s SXD, a Designtech featured in Harper’s Bazaar Japan and the recipient of $250K in funding, has landed a contract with a top international luxury brand. At the same time, Dartmouth Tuck’s VerprSolar startup has developed a V-Clamp that’s used by some of the world’s largest solar companies. It has also been recognized as a Top 10 innovation by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

PAGE 4: IN-DEPTH PROFILES OF 43 DISRUPTIVE MBA STARTUPS

Will Rush, Stack (Washington Foster)

SOMETIMES, SUCCESS IS JUST STAYING ON YOUR FEET

Still, the biggest achievements can always be measured in funding, partnerships, or awards. Exhibit A: Pelicargo, a Logisticstech firm that streamlines the sales process for small and mid-sized freight forwarders — providing consistency, transparency, and efficiency in the process. For Jon Acquaviva, a Pelicargo co-founder and MIT Sloan grad, the firm’s biggest achievement has been something more fundamental than accruing funding or bringing a product to market.

“Personally, I believe the biggest accomplishment in our venture has been meeting each other to form our founding team. Finding co-founders often feels like the white whale of entrepreneurship in that it’s vitally important to every step of the journey yet incredibly difficult to accomplish in practice, especially in the midst of the pandemic. Shinji and I met during our entrepreneurship course and then we met Edward, our technical co-founder, in the MIT dorms during a random encounter. Our history just proves that the key for entrepreneurship is to get yourself out there and be vocal with your ideas; if you think about your ideas forever and don’t talk to others about them, they’ll never grow into something tangible.”

Will Rush, whose Stack Fintech is busy raising a million dollars, points to something even more intangible: resilience. “The dogma of startup life will either spit you out piece-by-piece or draw you in deeper-and-deeper,” writes the University of Washington Foster School grad. “Over the past six months I have made $0, I’ve struggled to keep my non-work life afloat and I’ve been told ‘no’ or ‘I don’t get it’ about a thousand times. I’ve also never known more about myself, connected more deeply with the people around me, and been more positive about the impact I want to make on the world.”

BUSINESS SCHOOL: A SAFE HARBOR TO MAKE MISTAKES

Sometimes, startup success is just a matter of luck…the kind that only happens when preparation intersects with daring. That serendipity is one reason why Carnegie Mellon’s Culturora is still standing. A HR platform that connects employees in an increasingly online world, Culturora found a critical sponsor through the type of networking that serves as its purpose.

“I attended a roundtable with the Chief Operating Officer of THD in 2020 and made sure to ask him a question about their company culture during the pandemic,” explains founder Jody Madala. “His response gave me a perfect inroad to connect with him after the event! He then put me in touch with his head of HR, who then connected me to their leaders in Talent – which is our perfect customer contact. The timing was perfect since the Talent group was thinking about how to drive culture in the pandemic and post-pandemic world. THD has great use cases for us, and we really believe we connected with then at the perfect time!”

That said, the biggest supporters of these startups have always been the business schools where they’re incubated. At Carnegie Mellon, Mathew Polowitz founded Equa Health, a training platform that the firm describes as a “mindfulness coach in your pocket.” For Polowitz, the best part of MBA programming was it offered a safety net to fail again-and-again.

Leo Mindyuk, ML Tech (Chicago Booth)

“I tried out a number of paths before finding this venture,” he admits. “Design consulting, big tech, running for an office seat I didn’t win… The MBA experience was this pressure cooker of me repeatedly telling myself to “just go for it.” Sure, it was painful at times, but I was in this unique environment where I could pick myself up and the next thing would be right there for me to try. With the benefit of hindsight, I now see exactly how each of those failures created the opportunity for me to work a venture that’s even more aligned to my passions and my personality than anything I had failed at before.”

A SUPPORT SYSTEM

Another advantage to business school is programming custom-tailored to founders. At the University of Chicago’s Booth School, that comes in the form of the Polsky Center, which provides entrepreneurial training and support in the form of coursework, coaching, workshops, speakers, conferences, funding, and networking. It even includes tech and legal support to help founders prototype and commercialize their ideas. For Leo Mindyuk, the most valuable aspect of the Polsky Center involved competitions — the New Venture Challenge specifically, whose alumni range from Grubhub to Venmo.

“During the NVC competition, we were able to significantly improve our business idea by getting valuable feedback from the faculty as well as well-known venture capitalists and entrepreneurs,” Mindyuk notes. “In particular, the questions that they have been asking us helped us to improve our business plan and later in the summer raise significant funding from strategic angel investors and VC firms.”

Mindyuk’s classmate, Sebastian Rivas, also lists the New Venture Challenge as the most valuable part of his MBA experience — “by far.” However, he also cites his classes, particularly Entrepreneurial Finance and Private Equity and Commercializing Innovation, as invaluable resources for getting his venture off the ground.

Sophie Randolph, Green Room (Rice University Jones)

“These were all great classes that focus on the intersection between entrepreneurship and finance. I’ve found that it’s really important to understand these two standpoints well in order to create the most value – entrepreneurship is a lot about thinking big and executing, while finance is a lot about mitigating risks and making sure that the market will accept the entrepreneur’s idea. When both standpoints agree with each other, great things happen. If they are misaligned, then you’re still not there.”

‘ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS AND PUSHING BACK IN THE RIGHT PLACES’

Such points were hammered home by faculty, whose roles in student startups can range from executive coach to eventually investor. Kyle Judah plays the first role at Rice University, where he heads up the Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, or Lilie for short. Here, he left a lasting impact on Sophie Randolph…and her startup.

“With experience as both a founder and a funder, Kyle speaks from deep experience. His passion for helping students is boundless and I have been one grateful recipient of mentorship, introductions, dad jokes, and moral support. One of the biggest challenges I face is that I don’t know what I don’t know. Kyle has been a huge help in asking the right questions, pushing back in the right places, and making sure I’m as best set up for success as possible on the wildly unpredictable entrepreneurial journey.”

If anything, business schools channel a certain entrepreneurial spirit, one that encourages MBAs to dream big, team up, take risks, and solve problems. MIT, long known for tech innovation, is one such program that sparks this creative mindset.

“The entrepreneurial ecosystem here is like a massive planet with its own gravitational force pulling in experts and enthusiasts from every corner of the world,” writes Jon Acquaviva. “I came to MIT with a latent interest in entrepreneurship but really felt I would use my MBA to get a promotion or a new job. That lasted for a month or two at best, as I quickly found myself pulled into the ecosystem and brainstorming ventures with my classmates and professors.”

Manuel Godoy frames this b-school dynamic this way…

“Everyone at Wharton was rooting for us!”

Joshua Yang, Glyphic (Stanford GSB)

A PROMISING FUTURE

So what’s ahead for the 2021 disruptive MBA startups? At Duke University, Patrick Pierson-Prah hopes his Renmo venture turns monthly rent into the norm for West Africa. INSEAD’s Capim is equally ambitious. “We dream to help the 160 million Brazilians, who do not have a healthcare plan, to access the private health ecosystem, truly making the healthcare in our country universal,” writes Marcelo Lutz.

Others are looking to leave a mark, a proverbial “dent in the universe” in the words of Steve Jobs.  At London Business School, Caroline Williams and Mary Liu launched junee, a “borrow-and-return system of reusable bowls for lunches. Their goal, they say, is to help usher in a world where people will someday say, “Isn’t it crazy we used to throw things away after just one use?” Joshua Yang takes it even a step further with his venture.

“When people hear “biotech”, I want them to think “Glyphic”.”

Alas, some disruptive startups will flounder and fail. In the end, most founders aspire to the goals laid out by Jeffrey Gum: “Become a household name, change the swimwear industry forever by making shorter shorts and sungas more popular, help out and support the veteran community more, and build an incredible community about fitness and having a better life…and then sell for $100mm.”

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