Krishna Mahesh (MBA ’05) not only traveled the longest distance to arrive on campus for the final round of judging in the inaugural Alumni New Venture Contest, he also figured he had the longest shot at winning. The seven finalists, representing five domestic and two international HBS Clubs, made their start-up pitches to a panel of judges in late April. To his surprise, Mahesh, representing the HBS Club of India, took top honors and was awarded a $25,000 cash prize for his plan to manufacture low-cost medical beds for Indian health-care institutions.

“I expected to lose because most VC money today goes to telecom, high tech, or software,” said Mahesh, founder and CEO of Sundaram Medical Devices in Chennai.

Mahesh trained at Stanford as an engineer and worked for McKinsey and Toyota before attending HBS. He plans to apply engineering and cost control techniques he learned from the auto industry to the production of mechanical (“dumb”) and electronic (“smart”) beds. Eventually, he expects to develop an entire suite of compact hospital room furnishings.

The Alumni New Venture Contest was created with two goals in mind: to identify promising new business ventures among the School’s entrepreneurial graduates, and to create a mechanism to connect alumni with HBS faculty and the global HBS network of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and angel investors.

More than seventy teams entered the March regional competitions at the seven participating HBS Clubs. In addition to Sundaram Medical Devices, the regional finalists were:

Boston: iSpecimen (Mike Pierce, MBA ’01, interim COO) is building a network that connects clinical laboratories and hospital electronic medical record systems at leading institutions. The system will provide researchers with a platform they can search for desired specimens in real time.

Chicago: Cinekin (Constance Freedman, MBA ’06, chief strategy officer) uses people’s movie preferences to predict the compatibility of couples.

London: Qtara (Steve Berry, MBA ’79, chairman) is developing cutting-edge intelligent virtual assistants (sometimes known as avatars) for use by both organizations and individuals.

New York: TwoChop (Mo Lam, MBA ’05, founder) is a microgaming platform that plans to deliver “quick-engagement” games to users throughout the day.

Northern California: Redbeacon (Ethan Anderson, MBA ’03, CEO) offers a Web site designed to help consumers locate a business or person to handle local service needs, get price quotes, and book appointments.

Southern California: Kiwilimón (Deborah Dana Beyda, MBA ’08, cofounder) is a food and recipe Internet portal for Spanish-speaking users.

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