The Annual Coller $100,000 Startup Competition at Tel Aviv University’s Coller School of Management Sets Out
Preparations have begun for the annual Coller competition for new startups at Tel Aviv University’s Coller School of Management. This is the second year that the Coller $100,000 Startup Competition is taking place, the sum being the award to the winning startup.
The competition is intended for Tel Aviv University students or young alumni participating in new ventures at the beginning of their journey. Its aim is to help in promoting new ventures through the generous financial award to the winning initiative, exposure, support and professional guidance.
This year too the competition is open to initiatives from all the possible various areas, such as online solutions, biomedical applications, games and leisure product, and more. Of the ten initiatives that reach the final round of the competition, five will make presentations to a panel of judges that will include, amongst others, faculty members at the Coller School, managers of venture capital funds and entrepreneurs. Among the judges will be Jeremy Coller, Chief Investment Officer and Executive Chairman of Coller Capital, the firm he founded in 1990, Izhar Shay, a Prior Fund General Partner at Canaan Partners, Tzahi Weisfeld, General Manager of Microsoft for Startups, Fiona Darmon, Partner in Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP), Dr Iris Ginzburg, Director of the MBA Programs in Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Coller School.
According to Prof. Moshe Zviran, Dean of the Coller School of Management at Tel Aviv University, “Academia is fertile ground for growing the human capital that leads innovation and entrepreneurship. The competition is yet another building block in our broad range of activities to advance and implement these subjects in all areas of our teaching and research. It encourages and supports beginning entrepreneurs, enabling them to acquire practical experience combined with knowledge and business management tools that endow significant added value.”
Dr Iris Ginzburg adds that “the success of the competition with its launch last year has led to much interest among entrepreneurs, investors and venture capital funds. For new startups the meeting with mentors from academia and the area of hi-tech is often an important milestone in the development of the initiative.”
You can submit your application to participate in the competition up till 1May 2018. To be eligible at least one member of the team needs to be a Tel Aviv University student or young graduate (up to five years after graduation). Since the initiatives are new startups, they have to be at the stage where the applicants can present a proven and operative prototype, and if there is already initial investment it must not exceed NIS 250,000.
The winning startup will be able to choose between an investment grant to develop the initiative in the amount of $100,000 and a cash prize of $5,000. The ten finalists will have the benefit of exposure to the audience of interested parties and investors in the final round of the competition, which will take place this year on Wednesday, 6 June 2018, as well as individual financial and legal advice.
Background
The winning venture of the first competition in 2017
The winner of the first Coller $100,000 Startup Competition last year was Easy2Hike, the venture presented by Erez Talgam, a graduate of the MBA program in Management of Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and his partner, Uri Bar. Easy2Hike provides a unique platform that creates a new standard for hikers and enhances the experience for visitors to nature parks around the world. Managers of the parks can also access advanced tools that give them insights into the behavior of the visitors thereby enabling them to create new tailored experiences for the visitors and to improve the management of the parks and increase their income.
The annual international ranking of the Pitchbook research company
In its annual international ranking, the Pitchbook research company, which has surveyed tens of thousands of initiatives that raised venture capital over the last 11 years, ranked the MBA program of Tel Aviv University’s Coller School of Management in 13th place worldwide and first in Israel for growing entrepreneurs, according to the amount of capital that its alumni raised from venture capital funds. Pitchbook further ranks Tel Aviv University ranks in 9th place among universities worldwide in growing entrepreneurs with a bachelor’s degree who raised capital for the ventures they established.
Link to the competition website
https://en-coller.tau.ac.il/the-school/coller-competition2018
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