An interdisciplinary team of Yale students — including two from the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (F&ES) — recently won the top prize at the MBA Impact Investing Network and Training (MIINT) competition, an annual pitch competition where business students from around the world present business ideas to a panel of investors and entrepreneurs.
The team of
Leah Yablonka ’19 M.E.M.,
Emma Broderick ’21 M.E.M./M.B.A., and Yale School of Management (SOM) students
Vincent Caruso,
John Palfreyman and
Martha Deeds founded
EVmatch, a peer-to-peer electric vehicle charging app that provides financial incentives for owners of residential and commercial charging stations. The owners can generate income by renting their chargers out to drivers, who can use the app to find, reserve and pay for the use of the stations.
The Yale students, who won an SOM-sponsored pitch-off in February to qualify, beat out teams from 31 other schools, including Harvard, Columbia, Oxford, Cambridge and Wharton (the host school). Yale becomes the third school to win in back-to-back years;
last year’s team from Yale won by developing a storm water mitigation system.
“As someone who believes in finding market-based solutions for solving the greatest challenges we face today, MIINT taught me how to critically evaluate and pitch an investment that has potential to change the world while meeting a threshold for market viability,” Yablonka said about the experience, which earned EVmatch a $50,000 investment.
