Waste-conversion startup Sanergy bowls over competition (MIT)
A team of students with a toilet and a dream won this year’s grand prize, as
well as the audience-choice award, in MIT’s 21st annual $100K Business Plan
Competition.
Sanergy, the finalist in the emerging-markets track, beat out 280 teams with
its plan for an innovative form of low-cost, energy-converting sanitation.
Throughout the competition, Sloan School of Management MBA candidates David
Auerbach and Ani Vallabhaneni refined their pitch, which they presented at the
competition’s finale on Wednesday night.
Auerbach and Vallabhaneni opened with a question to the audience: “Who here
has used a clean toilet today?” They then outlined the critical need for
clean, affordable sanitation in African slums.
Sanergy’s solution: a low-cost toilet facility that separates waste to be
collected and converted to biogas and organic fertilizer. Within five years,
the team hopes to provide facilities to more than 500,000 Africans, generating
7.5 million kilowatt-hours of electricity and 11,000 tons of fertilizer.
Later in the evening, Sanergy’s pitch garnered the most votes from the crowd,
winning the team the audience-choice award and an additional $5,000 dollars.
Sanergy took home a total of $120,000, which it plans to put toward building
and implementing up to 60 toilets throughout …
