ESEG Startup Summit 2022 awards students from Colégio Etapa.

Startups were developed during the Entrepreneurship and Management course, developed by ESEG and taught to high school students.

Last Thursday (8), students from Colégio Etapa from the Valinhos, Vila Mariana and Vila Mascote units presented their entrepreneurship projects at the ESEG Startup Summit 2022. With live broadcast on the College and School's social networks, the event was marked by the presence of ESEG teachers and coordinators, who formed the evaluation panel, and by family and friends of the members of the finalist teams who attended the meeting.

This was the 10th edition of the event, which includes awarding prizes for the best work developed in the extracurricular Entrepreneurship & Finance course, which lasts 30 weeks and is taught to 2nd-year high school students at Colégio Etapa. Organized by Professor Pablo Ganassim and coordinated by Professor Carlos Coelho, the course is based on the Entrepreneurship and Finance Center of ESEG and consists of these two aspects, working on soft and hard skills, as well as addressing topics about the business world.

This year, out of 21 participating groups, four reached the final phase after passing through several elimination stages. During the process, the members had to deal with various everyday corporate situations, including online meetings, presentations to panels of professionals from multinational companies, and the exhibition of their projects at the MultiExpo of Colégio Etapa – an event where students present their main academic and artistic works produced during the school year.

Among the competing projects, "Reverse," created by students Diana Cairiac Spina Nunes Ferreira, Giulia Emy Terada, Julia Maria Fialho Kochi, Mariana Carvalhar Machado, and Nina de Campos Veronesi from the Vila Mascote campus, was the debut of the evening. The initiative aims to encourage increased recycling by providing incentives to the public and making disposal easier. With this project, the startup wants to contribute to a future with less environmental pollution and more recycling.

Next, the "Alugaí" project was presented, proposing to provide an application that can connect those who have an object at home that is rarely used with those who need to use that object once, through a rental system. The startup is composed of students Giovana de Castro Pontes, Giovana Montico Pellizzer, and Giovanna Marie Watanabe, from the Valinhos campus.

The startup “SustenAção” emerged from the idea of creating a platform that seeks to spread the culture of donation in Brazil, providing visibility and reliability to institutions and acting as an intermediary between donor and recipient. The group, formed by Camila Haddad Segato Liguori Gaia, Letícia Gorgulho Gritti, Letícia Midori Tutida, Lucas Castro Orbite, Marcos Peixoto Manso and Victoria Tamara Helito Périgo, from the Vila Mariana unit, was the third to present, demonstrating the functionality of the platform.

Finally, Artur Calvaro Fontenele, Daniel Soares Janzantti Sabino, Guilherme Sanches de Rinaldis, Luca Kenji Bannai, Mateus Visioli Konda, and Matheus Souza Pires, from the Vila Mariana unit, comprised the UVAC group. They presented a prototype of a project focused on developing environmental sterilization devices, with the purpose of contributing to the eradication of pandemics and bringing respiratory health to the world. The devices created by the startup use ultraviolet lights and filters that clean and sterilize the air in environments, eliminating viruses and bacteria.

To determine the winning team of the event, voting was conducted online and open to the public, through a form and on ESEG's Instagram, along with the decision of the evaluation panel, composed of Prof. Dr. Silvia Boarin, professor and coordinator of Postgraduate Studies at ESEG; Prof. Marcelo Dias, professor and general coordinator of ESEG; Prof. José Guilherme, professor and coordinator of the Administration course at ESEG; and Prof. Dimas Ferreira, director of special projects.

“In this final phase, the public is considered the investor and the bank the mega-investors of these startups. Therefore, each investor can allocate their investment of ESEG Moneys (fictitious currency) to each of the participating projects,” explained Professor Carlos Coelho.

After the voting and counting of the investments made in each startup, the ESEG Startup Summit 2022 declared the “SustentAção” project the winner, receiving 8,000 ESEG Moneys as an investment. Overcome with emotion, the team members celebrated and expressed their gratitude for all the support and guidance they received from the professors and project supporters. “I always believed in the project, but we had problems choosing a partner at the beginning. So, to imagine that we are here now, having succeeded, is unbelievable. As Professor Pablo said, everyone here won, and the group is impressive. I am extremely happy to see that we managed to achieve all this, all the stages,” commented Lucas Castro Orbite.

In total, 19,000 ESEG Moneys were invested in the final phase, leaving 6,000 ESEG Moneys for second place; 4,000 for third place; and 1,000 for last place.

Finally, all groups were given the opportunity to participate in the next edition of the ESEG Startup Summit in the final stages of the initiative, as well as receive mentoring from the Entrepreneurship and Economics and Finance Centers of ESEG, so that they can develop new learning and improvements regarding their projects. In addition, they will have access to expert professors to carry out analyses and provide targeted guidance on the areas of operation of their ventures.