Companies Started at Chicago Booth

The NVC has led to the creation of more than 50 companies by Chicago Booth students and those enrolled in other schools at the University of Chicago. Some companies have also been sold or merged with other entities. The list below is a sampling of the successful companies that have been launched through the annual competition that originally began in 1997.

	Chris Hill, ’04, and Jeff Wilcoxon, ’04 Bobtail Ice Cream Company is a chain of Chicago-based ice cream retail stores.
	Bryan Johnson, XP '07 Braintree Payment Solutions provides businesses credit card and electronic check processing, risk and fraud management, ecommerce solutions, and secure storage of credit card data.
	Sol Kanthack, '00 brightroom provides fast and efficient event photography services with online photo ordering.
	Michael Farb, '09 and Avi Stopper, '06 CaptainU is a cutting-edge college sports recruiting platform that connects high school athletes and college coaches.
	John Rodkin, '05 ClickShift is an online advertising optimization tool that helps companies manage their advertising campaigns. Sold to WebTrends in 2006.
	Barry Tartar, '03, and Courtney Hall, '03 EXACT Sports measures and predicts the abilities of individual athletes. Evaluations assist in both training and recruting.
	John Rodkin, '05 Flyswat is a free Web browser add-on that identifies and automatically hyperlinks existing words or phrases in Web pages. Sold to NBC Internet Inc. for $100 million in 2000.
	Matthew Maloney* and Mike Evans GrubHub.com is a free restaurant search engine. Restaurant patrons can place their "to-go" food orders online for all restaurants in their database that deliver food.
	Ben Fanger, '05 HealthSource Global Staffing places quality health professionals in medical facilities across the U.S.
	Jon Morris, ’05 Internet Marketing Initiative (IMI) teaches small and medium sized businesses how to acquire new customers via the Internet.
	Daniel Anderson, '94 LiquidTalk, Inc. empowers sales, service, and other remote employees to find, organize, create and distribute proprietary audio and video business content to mobile devices including BlackBerry, iPod, or iPhone. Acquired by OnPoint Digital in 2008.
	Jake Crampton, '98 medspeed provides healthcare transportation---pick-up and delivery, in Chicago, central Illinois, and the Indianapolis area for items including lab specimens, blood products, and medical records.
	Byron Crawford, '05 NoonSolar integrates a flexible solar panel into the body of a handbag, allowing it to charge your cell phone or ipod.
	Karen Gruber, '07 The Perfect Dinner provides fresh-made, family favorite dinners that are ready to heat and eat in the comfort of your own home.
	Karan Goel, ’06 PrepMe Corporation offers online tutoring to high school students studying for the SAT. In addition to winning the New Venture Challenge, Goel went on to take first place in the Fortune Small Business magazine business plan competition. Read about his win.
	Phillip Leslie, '09 ProOnGo allows mobile professionals to streamline expense reporting in just a few minutes.
	Blake Harper, '02 Raceline Motorworks is a concept store where children can design, build, and race their own remote-controlled car. Note: Although the idea for this company originated from the NVC, Harper and his cofounders are not part of the original team.
	George Aspland, '08, Scott Roberts, '08 and Adam Rodnitzky, '08 ReTel Technologies delivers powerful online shopper analytics and dynamic pricing to offline retail environments.
	J.G. Chirapurath, '01 Sarvega, now an Intel company, provides products that secure and scale XML-based Web services applications. Sarvega deployed the world's first XML appliance in production in 2001 and is the only company to deploy XML networking equipment in Global 1000 enterprises, carriers, and governments worldwide.
	Eric Bielke, '08 and JS Roy, '07 SoCore Energy is a solar energy system developer.
	Rita Rivindra, '04 StrongMail is a high-tech email application server. Rivindra consults to StrongMail and helped secure a $6 million Series A round of funding.
	Drew Massie, '04 TixNix brings lawyers and ticketed drivers together via this web-based business that helps people fight traffic tickets.
	Sean Harper, '09 and Joshua Krall, '09 TransFS is an online marketplace that helps business owners save time and money shopping for financial services such as Credit Card Processing. TransFS allows business owners to compare high-quality credit card processors on an apples-to-apples basis in minutes. Typically business owners reduce their credit card processing costs by 40% by finding a new processor through TransFS.
	John Rodkin, MBA '05, JD '05 Rodkin won second-place in the 2005 NVC for ClickShift (formerly F2), an online advertising optimization company. WebTrends, also an online advertising optimization company, acquired ClickShift in December 2006.
Chicago Booth evening student \| *University of Chicago college student

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Companies Started at Chicago Booth