In a first-ever result, all of the winners in the 2023 Alumni New Venture Competition (ANVC) hail from the same HBS class: the MBA Class of 2022. The ANVC finale, held virtually on March 22 and 23, brought eight global regional winners together for live pitches to the panel of judges and the more than 400 people tuning in from all around the world.

Ilana Springer Borkenstein and Eric Gruskin

Janvi Shah, Sylvan Guo, and Nicole Clay

Mariah Hilton Wood and Vanessa Royle

Ilana Springer Borkenstein and Eric Gruskin

Janvi Shah, Sylvan Guo, and Nicole Clay

Mariah Hilton Wood and Vanessa Royle

In the end, Ilana Springer Borkenstein and Eric Gruskin, from the New York region, took the Grand Prize of $75,000 with their startup, M7 Health, an innovative nursing-workforce management platform.

The Runner Up prize of $25,000 went to Boston region entry Janvi Shah, Nicole Clay, and Sylvan Guo, for Hue, an e-commerce technology platform that helps brands and retailers to showcase short-form, customer-generated video reviews on their websites.

The virtual audience then awarded the Crowd Favorite prize of $5,000 to Tilden, a nonalcoholic beverage startup cofounded by Mariah Hilton Wood and Vanessa Royle from the Southern California region.

In addition to being HBS classmates, the winning teams all cut their teeth in either the Startup Operations course or the first-year immersion program, Startup Bootcamp—both taught by Julia B. Austin, a senior lecturer at the Rock Center for Entrepreneurship.

“We started Hue in our RC year at HBS, and we actually met in the Startup Bootcamp and started working together,” says Shah.

The cofounders combined their previous tech and retail expertise to create Hue, with a goal of helping people feel represented when they shop online. “You’re able to see how real people have tried the products so you get a sense of how they work for someone just like you,” says Shah. “We source the video reviews from a diverse community of real people across all skin tones, all ages, and all body types to give customers the confidence to add to the shopping cart.”

This year’s Alumni NVC was the Hue team’s third time in the New Venture Competition. “We were finalists both years we were at HBS,” says Shah. “We won crowd favorite in our first year, and made the top four in our second year. But we are very resilient and we said, let’s see if we can win this time. It was really meaningful to us to take home one of the prizes this year, especially in the alumni competition, which is even more competitive.”

Shah says competing in the NVC has yielded invaluable feedback and powerful connections, including meeting a pitch judge who became a lead investor in their $2.1 million seed round last year.

“You really never know how those doors can open for you. It’s so important as an entrepreneur to be able to put yourself out there and pitch in any forum you can find. Winning Runner Up means so much to us, especially since this was the third time we competed. It really represents our growth and perseverance as founders, and it’s incredibly special to be recognized by the HBS entrepreneurship community, as our company truly grew up at HBS.”

At M7 Health, cofounders Borkenstein and Gruskin are addressing critical staffing needs in hospitals with its nursing workforce management platform. “We’re building the technological layer that hospitals and health systems need to adapt to the expectations of modern nurses in a post-Covid world,” says Borkenstein. “Nurses are expecting more flexibility, predictability, and autonomy in their roles, but hospitals’ current organizational infrastructure inhibits their ability to meet those needs.”

Like Hue, the concept for M7 Health was born while its cofounders were still at HBS. “We actually started this business in Julia Austin’s Startup Operations class,” says Borkenstein. “She’s been an advisor to us and has kept us apprised of ongoing commitment by HBS to support entrepreneurs well beyond graduation. She posted about the Alumni NVC in our Slack group, so we applied.”

Borkenstein adds that the HBS Club of New York played a significant role in supporting the team throughout the regional and final pitches. “That was the best part about it. The club connected us with four advisors to coach us for the pitch in the New York region and helped us craft our story more succinctly. And more powerfully, they connected us with investors.”

Gruskin says the $75,000 in prize money will help M7 Health grow its team. “With the win, we were able to more quickly bring in a product expert for consulting than we were going to do. We can do it now,” he says. “The money accelerates our ability to build faster and more precisely, so that hospitals and nurses can get more of what they need to make the job better for them.”

The prize money will also allow the cofounders some room to be creative. “We can explore things that we otherwise might not have had the freedom to do,” says Borkenstein.

Gruskin says there were other rewards from the NVC as well. “Being able to do the pitch online was really special,” he says. “Moments after our win, we had multiple online inquiries about our mission and our company. I don’t think we’d have had that without the virtual platform that the competition gave us. We’re really grateful. We want to take this generous prize and make the most of it.”

Tilden, voted Crowd Favorite, is the brainchild of cofounders Wood and Royle, who met at HBS in the Startup Bootcamp program. Tilden is aiming to change the game in the nonalcoholic beverage market by producing a line of sophisticated adult drinks minus the alcohol.

“I’m a lifelong teetotaler, and Vanessa stopped drinking during the pandemic,” says Wood. “So we were at Harvard, and going to these social events in elevated cocktail-drinking environments and watching our classmates sip and twirl beautiful cocktails or elegant wines. And we were standing there with a can of La Croix or a Diet Coke and feeling a little bit childish and not part of the experience.”

The two got to talking about it, asking why there wasn’t something “more elevated” for an adult nondrinker. “We started brainstorming about what we’d want that product to look like,” Wood recalls. “That’s really where it started. We didn’t know at that point if this was a good business idea or if there was larger demand out there.”

Their research gave a definitive yes. “We found that 43 percent of Gen Z adults over age 21 have never had an alcoholic cocktail, and about 45 percent of adult Americans don’t drink at all,” says Wood. “And 66 percent of Millennials are buying more no- and low-alcohol drinks. Those trends together mean that this growing wave of sober curiosity or more mindful drinking is bigger than just Vanessa and myself. So we said, let’s see if we can create a product that actually serves that market.”

After a lot of trial and error, Tilden launched a line of non-alcoholic cocktails in three different flavor profiles, all of which are low in sugar and contain no preservatives. Its first pre-order sold out in December, and the team has since launched a few dozen retail and restaurant partnerships and an online retail shop as well.

Because Tilden is a consumer product, Wood says the pair chose to enter the Alumni NVC via the Southern California region, because it is known to have a concentration of investors interested in consumer products and goods (CPG). The HBS Association of Southern California helped them prepare for the pitch and connected them with mentors.

At the finale, Wood says the pitch for Tilden sparked a burst of interest on the Zoom chat channels. “I think that was in part because so many people have experienced this need for a nonalcoholic option.”

Winning Crowd Favorite and $5,000 was just the beginning for Tilden. “This gave us visibility in front of 400 people online, and we got a flood of orders during our pitch. And since then, we’ve had alumni reach out, offering to make introductions or advise us. It’s been super fun.”

Wood says the competition offers so many benefits for founders and encourages fellow entrepreneurs to give it a go. “If you have a business idea, it’s worth applying,” she says. “It opens a network that has a ton of experience and expertise and value to add. There’s a lot of willingness to tap into that network and leverage it. That’s kind of the point of having access to this community. The more you lean into it, the more value you create for it, and can get out of it.”

The annual Alumni New Venture Competition, cohosted by the Rock Center for Entrepreneurship and HBS Alumni Relations, serves as a launch pad for innovative new ventures from HBS alumni, providing access and exposure to potential investors, mentors, and advisors. The competition is open to all HBS alumni founders with early-stage ventures.

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