Michigan Ross Students Prevail in the 2024 Michigan Business Challenge
Meet Your Class, a start-up revolutionizing how students meet and find resources on campus, was the most successful startup business at this year’s Michigan Business Challenge. Undergraduate and graduate students from the Ross School of Business and across the University of Michigan participated in the entrepreneurial competition, which is hosted by the Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies.
Michigan Ross student Jonah Liss, BBA ’25, is among the founders of Meet Your Class, a “social media ecosystem” that aims to help students form online communities, find roommates, and more easily connect with campus resources. Meet Your Class earned first place in the MBC Innovation Track category while also earning three additional accolades.
MBC is an annual campuswide business plan competition that exposes students to a rigorous, multi-phase business development and planning process. Participants in MBC are taken through the entire cycle of new venture creation, from writing a comprehensive business plan to composing a strong pitch. During each round, student teams pitch to judging panels of accomplished entrepreneurs and investors, which allows them to gain valuable feedback, win cash prizes, and expand their business networks. Eleven of the 12 finalist companies included a Ross student.
MBC awarded over $100,000 in prize money to the student-led companies that competed in three tracks of competition:
- The MBC Seigle Impact Track recognizes the business that best pursues a mission-driven goal and aims to stimulate the creation of new businesses, products, or services that prioritize social and/or environmental considerations.
- The MBC Innovation Track recognizes new ventures that offer a product, service, mobile application, or platform serving consumers or enterprises.
- The MBC Invention Track recognizes ventures that have intellectual property at the core of their high-tech venture and aims to stimulate the creation of new businesses in life sciences, physical sciences, mobility, augmented reality, virtual reality, and more.
The success that Meet Your Class experienced at MBC continues the momentum that the start-up has built in its early stages. In January, Liss and his fellow founders were recognized by Poets&Quants as one of 2023’s Most Disruptive Business School Startups. Liss told Poets&Quants that his long-term goal for the company is to work with schools across the country to “increase graduation rates and student satisfaction from acceptance onwards.”
The runner-up to Meet Your Class in the Innovation Track category was Trinity Barbara. The jewelry brand exclusively uses ethically sourced fine metals and gemstones to create versatile and durable jewelry. Trinity Barbara Brown, BBA ‘24, is the founder.
The Seigle Impact Track category featured Ross students on all four of its finalists. Affirmative, a start-up created by Sasha Kolodkin, MBA ’24, Matt Liu, MBA ’25, and Harashita Sinha, MBA ’25, won first place. The company aims to build a two-sided care navigation platform for transgender patients by leveraging automation technology and tight community ties.
The Seigle Impact Track runner-up was NeoNest Global. The non-profit organization is developing effective and accessible non-electric infant warming solutions for low-resource communities to reduce global infant hypothermia and mortality. Dhiya Krupashankar, BBA ‘25, is among the creators.
Dialysis Innovations earned first place in the MBC Invention Track. The start-up, led by Karthik Ramani, MBA ’24, provides a novel, innovative, and life-changing solution to end-stage kidney patients by providing a smart-dialysis needle that ensures better cannulation and better dialysis care. It enhances the patient and provider experience at lower cumulative costs by ensuring appropriate venous cannulation and reducing injuries/infiltration, or “vein blow-out.”
Sceptre, an innovative handheld instrument designed to eradicate biofilms in surgical procedures, was second place in the MBC Invention Track. Ryan McManus, MBA '25, Maya Ambady, MBA '25, and Graham Beck MBA '25, created Sceptre.
