IU’s BEST Competition Hits $1M Mark

Pictured Left: The Bee Corp. co-founders Lucas Moehle

An annual student entrepreneurship competition has reached a milestone and announced this year’s winning projects. The Building Entrepreneurs in Software and Technology program at Indiana University has invested $1 million over five years.

The BEST competition is a partnership with the School of Informatics and Computing and the Kelley School of Business.

The 2015-2016 winners are CareBand, a business that produces safety bracelets for people with dementia, and The Bee Corp., which develops technology to monitor internal hive conditions. Each company was awarded a $100,000 investment, which IU says is the largest amount offered for students in a business plan competition by any university in the world. Funding for the competition comes from a group of IU alumni, who will receive a stake in the company.

The BEST Competition was co-founded by Scott Dorsey, who is managing partner at High Alpha and co-founder, former chair and former chief executive officer of ExactTarget. He says "it’s exciting to see the winners range from one that is an idea to one that is already an ongoing business. I think the presentations and caliber of the businesses keep getting better and better over time, and it’s great to see the BEST Competition growing. We have students from all over the world and ideas that cross every industry that solve very different problems."

You can connect to more about this year’s competition by clicking here.