Companies Started at Chicago GSB

More than 40 companies have been started by Chicago GSB students while enrolled at the GSB or other schools at the University of Chicago as a result of the Edward L. Kaplan New Venture Challenge business plan competition. The companies below are a sampling of finalists from the annual competition that originally began in 1997.

	Chris Hill, ’04, and Jeff Wilcoxon, ’04 Bobtail Ice Cream Company is a chain of Chicago-based ice cream retail stores.
	Bryan Johnson, XP '07 Braintree Payment Solutions provides businesses credit card and electronic check processing, risk and fraud management, ecommerce solutions, and secure storage of credit card data.
	Sol Kanthack, '00 brightroom provides fast and efficient event photography services with online photo ordering.
	Samuel Dixon, Michael Dworecki*, Kevin Knapp, Michael Moyer, '04, Tu Nguyen, MS '03, William Thoburn, and Violeta Voykinska** Collectica.com helps collectors meet other collectors with common interests, join clubs, find networking events and buyers for their collections.
	Barry Tartar, '03, and Courtney Hall, '03 EXACT Sports measures and predicts the abilities of individual athletes. Evaluations assist in both training and recruting.
	Matthew Maloney* and Mike Evans GrubHub.com is a free restaurant search engine. Restaurant patrons can place their "to-go" food orders online for all restaurants in their database that deliver food.
	Jon Morris, ’05 Internet Marketing Initiative (IMI) teaches small and medium sized businesses how to acquire new customers via the Internet.
	Jake Crampton, '98 medspeed provides healthcare transportation---pick-up and delivery, in Chicago, central Illinois, and the Indianapolis area for items including lab specimens, blood products, and medical records.
	Karen Gruber, '07 The Perfect Dinner provides fresh-made, family favorite dinners that are ready to heat and eat in the comfort of your own home.
	Karan Goel, ’06 PrepMe Corporation offers online tutoring to high school students studying for the SAT. In addition to winning the New Venture Challenge, Goel went on to take first place in the Fortune Small Business magazine business plan competition. Read about his win.
	Blake Harper, '02 Raceline Motorworks is a concept store where children can design, build, and race their own remote-controlled car. Note: Although the idea for this company originated from the NVC, Harper and his cofounders are not part of the original team.
	J.G. Chirapurath, '01 Sarvega, now an Intel company, provides products that secure and scale XML-based Web services applications. Sarvega deployed the world's first XML appliance in production in 2001 and is the only company to deploy XML networking equipment in Global 1000 enterprises, carriers, and governments worldwide.
	Rita Rivindra, '04 StrongMail is a high-tech email application server. Rivindra consults to StrongMail and helped secure a $6 million Series A round of funding.
	Drew Massie, '04 TixNix brings lawyers and ticketed drivers together via this web-based business that helps people fight traffic tickets.
	John Rodkin, MBA '05, JD '05 Rodkin won second-place in the 2005 NVC for ClickShift (formerly F2), an online advertising optimization company. WebTrends, also an online advertising optimization company, acquired ClickShift in December 2006.
Chicago GSB evening student \| *University of Chicago college student

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Companies Started at Chicago GSB