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Slaight Competition

Three Students hold up a cheque of twenty-five thousand dollars after winning the Slaight Competition.
2019 Slaight Competition Recap

Congratulations to the TRSM student teams behind startups Travelot and mettleAI for each winning $25,000 in the Slaight New Venture Competition, hosted by StartMeUp @ Enactus Ryerson, on March 19, 2019.

For 18 years, the Slaight New Venture Competition in TRSM, generously supported by the Slaight Family Foundation, has fostered student entrepreneurship by awarding two $25,000 prizes of startup seed money to two TRSM students – one female and one male. This year’s winners were Abdullah Memon (Business Technology Management) for mettleAI, a system designed to help opiate and alcohol-dependent individuals in recovery, and Tania Bawa (Human Resources Management) for Travelot, a platform for travellers wanting to sell their non-refundable plane tickets and hotel reservations. 

Memon and his team made up of Mitul Shah and Razi Syed developed mettleAI, a system of care for opiate and alcohol-dependent individuals that predicts regressive behaviour before a relapse occurs. It uses a predictive model created with machine learning and artificial intelligence. The algorithm evaluates human inputs, behavioural data and Fitbit (or other wearable) statistics to provide a prediction for the risk of a relapse. 

“Winning this competition is something we are truly grateful for,” says Memon.  “Being a young team working in the healthcare industry, we know the odds are stacked against us. But having advisors and partners from leading Canadian health organizations, along with funding from the Slaight New Venture Competition, will allow us to navigate the industry, build our management and advisory team, and help to clinically validate the algorithm and platform.”

Bawa and teammates Samarth Arabastani, Emily Gilmour and Anish Patel created the peer to peer marketplace Travelot to connect travellers with unwanted non-refundable but transferable bookings with travellers looking for discounted deals.  The platform uses proprietary technology to analyze key market parameters, providing a recommended sale price for sellers to have the highest probability of a sale, while offering buyers with predictive pricing and live price comparisons to ensure they are getting the best deals on the market. 

“Our two main priorities after successfully winning this competition are to increase marketing for customer acquisition to reach our target number of users for testing with our beta platform,” explains Bawa. “In addition, after completing the testing phase and analyzing the results, this funding will allow us to start development on the final platform for Travelot.”

Other finalists that competed at this year’s Slaight New Venture Competition included Ahmad Kamali (BeautyDel), Parsa Hemmati (CheaprEats), Carol Xie (LendMe) and Temirlan Tokabek (Vacant).

The Master of Ceremonies for this year’s event was Vilirsa Radajurai and Katik Balasundaram, who won the 2018 Slaight New Venture Competition for SCUTO, an events management platform to hire reliable vendors.

As a TRSM Startup Certified new venture currently incubated at Ryerson’s Digital Media Zone (DMZ), SCUTO used the $25,000 Slaight New Venture Competition funding to launch their new website and hire four full-time employees. With the support of the DMZ, they have been able to successfully pitch to an investor for an additional $10,000, and now have 180 platform members. In their first year of launch, SCUTO has a projected revenue of $500,000.