Waste-conversion startup Sanergy bowls over competition
A team of students with a toilet and a dream won this year’s grand prize, as well as the audience-choice award, in MIT’s 21st annual $100K Business Plan Competition. Sanergy, the finalist in the emerging-markets track, beat out 280 teams with its plan for an innovative form of low-cost, energy-converting sanitation. Throughout the competition, Sloan School of Management MBA candidates David Auerbach and Ani Vallabhaneni refined their pitch, which they presented at the competition’s finale on Wednesday night.Auerbach and Vallabhaneni opened with a question to the audience: “Who here has used a clean toilet today?” They then outlined the critical need for clean, affordable sanitation in African slums. Sanergy’s solution: a low-cost, portable toilet facility that separates waste to be collected and converted to biogas and organic fertilizer. Within five years, the team hopes to provide facilities to more than 500,000 Africans, generating 7.5 million kilowatt-hours of electricity and 11,000...