Sundaram Medical Devices, a Chennai-based startup, has won the Harvard Business School (HBS) competition for new ventures. The initiative, called Alumni New Venture Contest, was a first of its kind from HBS, said a company statement. Sundaram Medical Devices is launched by Krishna Mahesh, an alumni of HBS.
With this, Sundaram also won a cash prize of $25,000, apart from receiving mentoring from an HBS faculty member prior to the final round. Apart from Sundaram, which has represented HBS Club of India, alumni from Boston, Chicago, London, New York, Northern California, and Southern California participated in the contest.
Sundaram is engaged in manufacturing high-tech and low-cost medical bed that meets the highest standards of quality, safety and usability for both the patients and the care-giver. “With a population of over one billion and a shortage in excess of 3 million beds, the market for locally manufactured medical beds is dramatically underserved,” Mahesh said in the statement.
Alumni New Venture Contest was designed in line with the HBS' previous initiative HBS Student Business Plan Contest, which is in its 14th year now, to support promising new ventures founded by HBS graduates.
Lynda M. Applegate, the School's Martin Marshall Professor of Business Administration and chair of the Entrepreneurial Management Unit, said, “We have conceptualised the Alumni New Venture Contest with two goals in mind. First, we wanted to identify promising new business ventures among our very entrepreneurially-oriented alumni body; second, and perhaps more importantly, to create a formal mechanism to connect alumni who are starting new companies with faculty expertise and the global HBS network of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and angel investors.”
Around 70 teams had participated for the contest in the preliminary round, while only seven were selected for the final.
