SSES team Student Competitions, founded by SSE students, wins 1st place in Venture Challenge in San Diego

On March 17-19, Student Competitions AB, founded by SSE students, represented SSES in one of the biggest business plan competitions in the United States, and won the prestigious first place. Student Competitions were represented by two of the co-founders Gustav Borgefalk and Robert Lyngman, who were up against student entrepreneurs from top international schools like Harvard, UCLA, John Hopkins University and HEC Montreal.

For more than 20 years, Venture Challenge has showcased next generation companies and given graduate students from around the world an opportunity to seek investment in their business ideas. For Student Competitions this opportunity came at a perfect time.

– The contacts we got through the competition will be extremely valuable for our future launch in the US", says Gustav Borgefalk, and continues;

– Our business idea is to organise recruitment and innovation challenges for companies, targeting students. In order to do that, we compete ourselves in as many competitions as we can. This was the first business plan competition in the US that we have participated in and of course, winning it was amazing!

SSES has a good track record of making it to the finals, but this is the first time that SSES wins the whole competition.

The team coach SSES teacher Dr Terrence Brown says:

– I have been talking about business model innovation for a while here at SSES. One of the primary reasons Student Competitions prevailed was its innovative business model. The judges had never seen anything like it and were pleasantly surprised. Our win here at Venture Challenge definitely helps confirm the quality of our students, our program, SSES and Swedish startups.

The SSES team is now directly qualified to participate in Venture Lab Investment Competition, formerly Moot Corp, the world’s most prestigious investment competitions that will take place in Texas, Austin in May.

About SSES:

The Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship is recognised around the world as a leading academic facility in the area of innovation and entrepreneurship. The school utilises the exciting and diverse academic environments of its member institutions (Stockholm School of Economics, KI, KTH, Stockholm University and Konstfack), gathering their innovative and entrepreneurial competencies all under one roof in a joint education programme.