Congratulations to Sasin MBA student team, c, which recently won the Lightning Round at the 26th annual New Venture Championship, one of the world’s most prestigious and longest-running postgraduate start-up competitions, hosted by the University of Oregon in Portland, Oregon, USA.

PDvice team, represented at this competition by Aphisada Pattananitsakul (MBA2015), Dolhathai Whangmongkollert (MBA2015), Kawin Kaentrakool (EMBA2015), Nalinrat Boonnikornvoravith (MBA2016), and Rapheepong Ghai (MBA2016), competed in what many referred to as the ‘group of death’ Semifinals track against teams from Purdue, Northwestern, and Georgia Tech. Despite scoring extremely high across the board (with several judges expressing strong interest in investing in the team and one veteran judge giving the team perfect score across all judging criteria – this is unheard of at such a competition), PDvice narrowly lost out for a place in the finals by the slimmest of margins to the Northwestern team that became the eventual winner of the Championship.

Despite this disappointment, on Saturday morning, PDvice passionately fought on against all other non-finalist teams in the closed-door Lightning Round, during which the team was required to make an initial bare-bones quick pitch to a new panel of judges, who then raised certain issues for the team to address and adjust in a subsequent re-pitch. PDvice drew upon months of rigorous field work in building their start-up venture and used their wit and agility to simply wow the judges in easily claiming the win.

We wish PDvice every success in their pursuit of a full commercial launch of their Parkinson’s disease early detection platform.