Wash U senior Jolijt Tamanaha is one of six women to receive a $50,000 equity investment grant and support from the new St. Louis-based Prosper Accelerator. The entrepreneurs selected for the inaugural class will take part in a three-month program that includes training, mentoring, and a curriculum designed specifically to help women scale their businesses and raise follow-on capital.

Olin alumni, professors, and lecturers are playing important roles in the Prosper organization that was created in 2012 to address the entrepreneur gender gap in the St. Louis region.

• Dr. Mary Jo Gorman, EMBA’ 96, is overseeing the accelerator program as a Prosper Capital Managing Partner.
• Kasey Joyce Grelle, MBA’14, Prosper Capital Venture Partner and Principal at Cultivation Capital, will be a mentor to the new accelerator entrepreneurs.
• Maxine Clark is a Prosper Capital Managing Partner and mentor. The founder and former Chief Executive Bear, Build-A-Bear Workshop, is a frequent lecturer at Olin and co-taught a course last semester on women and leadership with Prof. Michelle Duguid.
• St. Louis-based venture capital firm Cultivation Capital, co-founded by Cliff Holekamp, senior lecturer in entrepreneurship, provides back-office support to the Prosper Women Entrepreneurs Startup Accelerator.
• Peter Finley, Former CFO at Observable Networks and Pulse Therapeutics, Co-founder, Thompson Street Capital Partners, is a an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at Olin and will serve as an accelerator mentor.

Farmlicipty co-founders Joljit Tamanaha and Drew Koch

Jolijt Tamanaha exited from her first venture, Farmplicity last year. (Farmplicity was launched in Olin’s Hatchery class.) Her new startup, Champio is a platform on which a company’s employees compete to share the best/most relevant social media posts about the business.

Applications for the Spring 2015 Prosper Accelerator class came from over nine countries on four continents and represented a variety of industries. In addition to Champio, the members of the class include:

KiteReaders
KiteReaders designs, develops and distributes e-books and apps for children ages 3 to 8.

Wondermento
Wondermento is building a new way to track your dog’s activity and to know what they are up to at all times digitally and through their hardware design.

Bookalokal
Bookalokal is a marketplace for food entrepreneurs to list their services available for sale (out of their home) and to connect with customers looking for a unique dining experience.

HealthyMe
HealthyMe platform design has five key elements to address the non- compliance issue and patients’ lack of resources to effectively manage their disease on a daily basis, the key problems of patients who have chronic disease.

Smart Monitor
SmartMonitor created SmartWatch®, an intelligent wristwatch that continuously monitors movement, developed for people prone to epilepsy and seizure disorders.

Wash U senior Jolijt Tamanaha is reporting from the Web Summit in Dublin this week for St. Louis-based Techli.com. Read her reports on Techli as she navigates through the who’s who of the startup world, tech innovation, VCs, and journalists.

Farmlicipty co-founders Joljit Tamanaha and Drew Koch

Jolijt cofounded her first startup, Farmplicity, during her freshman year and exited last year. She is currently working on building a new company, Champio, a social media content generator.

For most rising college seniors, the last weeks of junior year are spent worrying about summer internships and facing the reality of post-college plans.

For Jolijt Tamanaha, her last weeks of junior year at Washington University in St. Louis were spent making a deal to sell a startup she co-founded called Farmplicity — an online marketplace that matches restaurants with local farmers — founded in a course through Olin Business School called The Hatchery.

And it’s that course — and the mentoring received at the university — that Tamanaha, a political science major in Arts & Sciences, credits for allowing her to grow and sell a successful startup while still in school.

“The Hatchery is great because it is structured in a way that provides you with enough guidance that you don’t feel like you’re completely on your own,” Tamanaha said, “but enough freedom that you truly learn through experience.

“The course taught us how to organize our thoughts and how to pitch the business,” she said. “The multiple presentations that we made about Farmplicity were excellent practice for the many times we pitched Farmplicity to judges, potential investors and customers.”

Farmlicipty co-founders Joljit Tamanaha and Drew Koch

Farmplicity, started in 2013 by Tamanaha with Drew Koch and Andrew Lin, both recent alumni of Olin, currently matches 130 local farmers to more than 100 restaurants. The venture helps smooth the process of ordering locally-grown produce, fruits, meats and other food products.

Sunfarm Food Service, a leader in providing fine produce and dairy products to top restaurants, caterers, hotels and other food services, acquired the startup in early May.

“Our students at Washington University never cease to amaze me,” said Clifford Holekamp, senior lecturer in entrepreneurship, director of Olin’s entrepreneurship platform and a Hatchery professor. “Farmplicity went from Hatchery class, to founding, to growth, to exit — all before the co-founder’s senior year. It’s a very impressive accomplishment.

“I am pleased to see our students make a lasting contribution to the farm-to-table supply chain in St. Louis,” Holekamp said. “With the acquisition by Sunfarm, Farmplicity will have the infrastructure and sustainability to impact the community for years to come.”

The Hatchery, open to both WUSTL undergraduates and graduate students, is one of the university’s capstone entrepreneurship courses. It was one of the first business courses in the country to use multidisciplinary team collaboration, mentoring and coaching to support students as they launch enterprises while in college.

Enrolled students can work on their own social or commercial venture ideas or partner with community entrepreneurs already in development.

Starting Farmplicity “has been an amazing journey that shaped my whole experience at the university,” Tamanaha said. “Without Farmplicity, I wouldn’t have registered for many of the classes I’ve taken or met most of the professors who have helped me.

“School work is a very different experience when you can sit in class and think ‘How would I apply this to my business?’ Through Farmplicity, I interacted with so many local professionals, which taught me to love St. Louis and all of the opportunities in this city.

“Farmplicity has the potential to modernize local food distribution so that small farmers can successfully compete with larger growers, and Sunfarm is the perfect company to turn that potential into results,” Tamanaha said.

“Sunfarm’s proven expertise in delivering food also will create a more efficient and more synchronized Farmplicity for both farmers and chefs,” she said. “And most importantly, Sunfarm shares our values and belief in the importance of building a strong local food movement.”

Now that the acquisition is over, Tamanaha will focus on enjoying her senior year. But the entrepreneurship bug hasn’t left her just yet.

“I have an idea for a new marketing startup that I’m going to work on,” she said.

Article by Neil Schoenherr, WUSTL News

Get a behind the scenes look at the road to the Olin Cup Competition final round with the Epi Squared Team in this video. The team is made up of undergraduate and graduate students from the School of Engineering & Applied Science, Olin Business School and the School of Medicine. They are developing an implantable device that would serve as a mobile solution to reducing the severity of epileptic seizures.

The Olin Cup Awards Ceremony is Thursday, Jan. 30, 2014, at 5 p.m. in May Auditorium. For more details, see story about keynote speaker David Karandish, CEO, Answers.com.

Finalists in this year’s Olin Cup competition are:

• Epi Squared*, developing an implantable mobile solution to reduce severity of epileptic seizures;
• Farmplicity*, an online marketplace making it easy for chefs to acquire local food;
• Genetix Fusion*, developing the next generation of transfection kits for biomedical researchers;
• Nanopore Diagnostics*, developing products that provide immediate molecular diagnostic testing;
•  Stumpy’s Spirits*, locally sourced grain-to-glass premium spirits distiller;
•  SynerZ Medical, developing an outpatient device for treatment of obesity and type 2 diabetes; and
• Zymplr, developing a helmet designed to reduce concussions in high-impact sports.

Teams marked with an asterisk * include Washington University students who are eligible for the $5,000 student cash prize.

Thanks to WUSTL Public Affairs for sharing this video.

Winners of this year’s Olin Cup will be announced Thursday, Jan. 30 at 5 p.m. in May Auditorium. $70K in seed funding is at stake. See companies in the final round below.

The keynote speaker at the Olin Cup Awards Ceremony will be David Karandish (BS’05), CEO of Answers.com.  David co-founded AFCV Holdings—now known as Answers—in 2006 with the mission of building and overseeing web-based businesses and technologies that connect information seekers to the most relevant content from both experts and consumer communities. Answers is headquartered in the Delmar Loop with offices in New York City and Mountain View, California.

The keynote and Olin Cup awards will be followed by a poster board session from all the finalists and a reception. Register at ideabounce.com.

Finalists in this year’s Olin Cup competition are:

• Epi Squared*, developing an implantable mobile solution to reduce severity of epileptic seizures;
• Farmplicity*, an online marketplace making it easy for chefs to acquire local food;
• Genetix Fusion*, developing the next generation of transfection kits for biomedical researchers;
• Nanopore Diagnostics*, developing products that provide immediate molecular diagnostic testing;
•  Stumpy’s Spirits*, locally sourced grain-to-glass premium spirits distiller;
•  SynerZ Medical, developing an outpatient device for treatment of obesity and type 2 diabetes; and
• Zymplr, developing a helmet designed to reduce concussions in high-impact sports.

Teams marked with an asterisk * include Washington University students who are eligible for the $5,000 student cash prize.

More news from the Skandalaris Center:

As we conclude this year’s Olin Cup, we congratulate the finalists in the 2014 YouthBridge Social Enterprise & Innovation Competition, with links to their ideas:

• Bridge Bread, http://ideabounce.com/yseic14/3896.html
• Farming Blueprint, LLC, http://ideabounce.com/yseic14/3872.html
• Girls Dreaming Big, http://ideabounce.com/yseic14/3847.html
• Girls in the Know, http://ideabounce.com/yseic14/3765.html
• IDWIL, http://ideabounce.com/yseic14/3851.html
• Kulishana Cookbooks, http://ideabounce.com/yseic14/3818.html
• LifeBridge Farms, http://ideabounce.com/yseic14/3812.html
• Made for Freedom, http://ideabounce.com/yseic14/3526.html
• Playing for the Cause, http://ideabounce.com/yseic14/3766.html
• STEMs For Youth, http://ideabounce.com/yseic14/3820.html
• Thrifty Boutique, http://ideabounce.com/yseic14/3885.html

We are able to support so many finalist teams this year with additional funding from the Brentmoor Foundation, so this year’s finalists include not only nonprofit ventures but commercial ventures with a social mission.  Save the date of Thursday, April 10 for the YouthBridge SEIC Awards Ceremony.

Upcoming Events:
·         This Friday, January 31, is the deadline for students and host commercial and social ventures to apply for the Skandalaris summer internship program. For more info see our website at sc.wustl.edu.
·         Next Wednesday, February 5, we will host a workshop on Social Value.  We offer this workshop separate from our Third Thursday events at this time of year to assist our YouthBridge SEIC teams in their deliverables for the competition, but the workshop is free and open to all.  In it we will summarize the approach we use to assess ventures’ social value measurement plans.  The workshop will be led by Ken Harrington, Managing Director of the Skandalaris Center.
·         Thursday, February 20, is our next Third Thursday Skills Session and IdeaBounce®.  The Skills Session topic will be “Marketing,” and the deadline to post your idea to be considered to pitch for the IdeaBounce® is Monday, February 17.
·         Monday, March 3, is the deadline to apply for the Skandalaris Center’s new Global Impact Award.  For more information see the Welcome Kit.