In 2020, the HPI hosted the business plan competition for the eighth time, with which it aims to support young start-ups in cooperation with the HPI Seed Fund. A total of 21 start-up teams with at least one HPI member participated in the competition. Since mid-May, the young entrepreneurs have been presenting their ideas and receiving targeted feedback and input over several phases in order to work intensively on their business model.
The winners of the HPI Business Plan Competition 2020: onetask.ai
With the idea of combining data annotation and the validation of AI models into one step in order to shorten the process of a costly and lengthy AI introduction, the founding team "onetask.ai" was able to convince the jury and win the eighth business plan competition at the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI). On the morning of 7 September, Johannes Hötter (22), Henrik Wenck (26) and Simon Witzke (25) were already delighted with their win, which includes personal scholarships of up to €50,000, an investment offer of €50,000 from the HPI Seed Fund and one year's business coaching from the HPI School of Entrepreneurship (E-School). The competition is organised by the E-School together with the HPI Seed Fund. The E-School also supports the teams in the process of developing their start-up idea.
"The application areas for artificial intelligence are almost limitless. Virtually everyone of us is able to find individual and suitable use cases after getting a conceptual overview" says Johannes Hötter Master's student at HPI. "With our tool, any interested domain expert will be able to create AI models themselves by performing just one task" adds co-founder Henrik, also HPI Master's student, and Simon Witzke, founder number three and HPI student, adds "...and this is not only cost and time efficient, but also with the lowest possible risk." The founders would like to use the winnings to finalise their product for launch next year and to realise the first pilot projects.
"We want to encourage and support students at HPI to start their own companies and will continue to expand our entrepreneurship offerings in the coming years," says HPI Institute Director and jury member Professor Christoph Meinel. Together with Jonas Witt (HPI alumnus and serial entrepreneur), Robin Staszek (CFO Hasso Plattner Ventures) Dr. Frank Pawlitschek (Director E-School and Managing Director HPI Seed Fund) and Dr. Nicolai Bohn (HPI Seed Fund), Meinel congratulated the winners and handed over a symbolic cheque for 100,000 euros.
The combination of practical university education and integrated entrepreneurship support at HPI is unique and allows the young talents in Potsdam to benefit twice over: https://hpi.de/studium/entrepreneurship.html
