UT Team Tackles Crowded Urban Spaces with OptiMrkt

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When a group of six UT students started researching ways to create social enterprises that increase the income of people living in crowded urban spaces, they realized a lack of investment capital was a glaring niche.

OptiMrkt provides an online platform for the more than 200 million micro entrepreneurs in India, group members say. Artisans are able to seek capital and sell their goods through OptiMrkt and receive funds and repay their loans through their cell phones in a mobile wallet account.

“What makes OptiMrkt unique from other microfinance institutions is the peer-to-peer model,” said Monty Berrow ’18, an entrepreneurship and marketing double major from London. Local artisans are given access to capital and are able to repay the loan with a set percentage of future sales. “They are seamlessly paying it back as the market grows.”

Berrow joins Yuliya Chashchina ’17, Jennifer Finney ’16, Luciano Perdomo ’19, Bay Downing ’18 and Chenoy Ceil MBA ’17 in their quest for the 2016 Hult Prize.

In partnership with the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), the Hult Prize is a startup accelerator for social entrepreneurship, which brings together college and university students from around the globe to solve the world’s most pressing issues. This year’s theme, selected by President Bill Clinton, focuses on crowded urban spaces.

The group won a bid to the Hult Prize Regional Finals March 11–12 from the UT-hosted on-campus event back in December. They were one of six finalists in the regional competition in Boston, placing them in the top 30 out of 25,000 teams around the world. They are now competing for a wildcard spot, which is open to all teams and is based on a slide deck, video and crowdfunding campaign. The wildcard round is open through April 23 with the finalist announced May 1.

“This has so much potential,” said Ceil.

After OptiMrkt won the on-campus competition in December, they decided they needed to get on-the-ground experience. So they cleared their schedules for winter break and headed to India.

“There’s only so much secondary research you can do,” said Berrow. “Especially in the slums, everything is so unregulated.”

Berrow was familiar with the Hult Prize through Trent Lott ’15, a member of BamBoost, which made it to the wildcard round in 2015. Lott played on UT’s soccer team with Berrow and Downing.

“I saw all of the opportunity it brought to him,” said Berrow, who’s spent time in the slums in Sri Lanka and South Africa as a high school student coaching children’s soccer and felt a call to do something greater with his career. “I want to build a business that impacts global poverty.”

OptiMrkt makes a profit through the microloan’s processing fee from the artisans. In addition, if the investor chooses to keep his or her profits in OptiMrkt, further investing in the same artisan or trying another, they incur no fees. If they decide to withdraw their funds, OptiMrkt receives a processing fee.

“We are also providing a marketplace for artisans to sell their products, which helps pay back the loan,” said Ceil, who was a lawyer in India for three years working on corporate mergers and acquisitions before coming to UT, and harbored his own ideas of a virtual law firm to make law services more accessible to the global market.

Finney, who is graduating this May with a degree in public health with a minor in sociology, said they are all prepared to take OptiMrkt the distance. The funding and connections with Hult would be wonderful, but they are planning their futures with OptiMrkt at the helm.

“It went from being an idea to coming to life for all of us when we were in India,” Finney said. “We knew we had a good chance with this idea.”