Cambridge MBA students win competition award for Oxwash for serving NHS staff during the pandemic.
A team of Cambridge MBA students recently won a prize of $25,000 at the global MBA Impact Investing Network & Training (MIINT) competition and as their chosen venture in the competition, they invested the money to an Oxford-based laundry business serving NHS staff during the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic.
The team of five – Julian Payne, Nareewat (Eng Eng) Kujareevanich, Yuanyuan (Yvonne) Gong, Ahmed Raafat and Dae Won Lee – all MBA class of 2019, were awarded first runner-up in the competition where they competed with around 100 MBA teams globally.
The Cambridge team spent the first seven months of their studies working on the competition, said Nareewat (Eng Eng) Kujareevanich in an MBA blog posted on the Cambridge Judge Business School website. “Although our team were very diverse in professional backgrounds and cultures, a good and long-lasting friendship has developed gradually across every weekly meeting. In the Autumn, we were tasked by MIINT to develop our impact investment thesis and to source impact-driven startups for a potential seed investment of $50,000,” she said.
From a list of 40 startups the team decided to represent Oxwash, an eco-laundry service which repositioned itself to deliver service to the NHS during the coronavirus crisis.
Nareewat (Eng Eng) says the prize money will help Oxwash “to roll out its laundry hub, as planned, across several cities in the UK, including Cambridge. When the social distancing measurements are eased, we are planning to visit the Cambridge branch and welcome the CEO Kyle Grant and his team, to their new Cambridge home.”
The MIINT competition is an experiential lab designed “to give students at business and graduate schools a hands-on education in impact investing.”