Posted on over 1 year ago by Laurentina Kennedy
Strive wins NovaUCD's 2022 Student Enterprise competition
Strive team members Aness Al Qawlaq, Saoirse Kelders and Sean Hughes
Strive, an emerging HR start-up, has been named as the overall winner of the 2022 NovaUCD Student Enterprise Competition and a €5,000 cash prize.
Strive is developing an online platform to match students and recent graduates to job opportunities by providing an optimal fit between the individual and the employer using a machine learning algorithm and an intuitive user experience.
It said it aims to focus on providing higher quality information about career opportunities, transparency, and data driven insights to empower students to find careers they are truly passionate about and to enable employers to improve retention rates and hire better suited candidates for their organisation.
The members of the strive team are Saoirse Kelders, who has just completed her studies in the UCD Lochlann Quinn School of Business, Raena McElwee, who has just completed her studies in the UCD School of Mathematics and Statistics along with Yevhenii Mormul and Aness Al Qawlaq, both undergraduate students in the UCD School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, and Sean Hughes, a graduate of Global Commerce at NUI Galway.
The NovaUCD Student Enterprise Competition is an intensive four week mentoring programme for student entrepreneurs.
The programme is now in its 8th year and is run by NovaUCD, the Centre for New Ventures and Entrepreneurs at University College Dublin. It works as a framework to support undergraduate and postgraduate students who want to work together to develop and grow start-up companies.
Ten early-stage student ventures and 24 participants took part in year's competition.
Over 60 early-stage ventures and nearly 150 students have now completed the NovaUCD Student Enterprise Competition over the last eight years.
Two other participating ventures, Trust Homes and ELTC.earth, were announced as second and third place winners and receive €3,000 and €2,000 cash prizes respectively.
Trust Homes aims to provide a transparent, reliable, and secure housing platform for both tenants and landlords to protect them from scams, removing biases, stress and anxiety in the house hunting process.
ELTC.earth empowers communities of advocates to deliver meaningful action on climate change using an ecosystem of products, services and resources to aid them on their sustainability journey.
The seven other early-stage ventures taking part in this year's competition also each receive a €1,000 cash prize for completing the programme.
Tom Flanagan, UCD Director of Enterprise and Commercialisation, said it was fantastic that after two years of being virtual this year's four-week competition took place in-person enabling the participating students to come together at NovaUCD to refine their start-up ideas.
"We now hope in the months ahead to see many of these early-stage student ventures move forward and develop further and in due course successfully launch on the market," Mr Flanagan said.
The sponsors of the 2022 NovaUCD Student Enterprise Competition are, AIB, Arthur Cox, Deloitte, Ericsson, Goodbody Stockbrokers and Xilinx.