Por Adela, a payments platform for trucking fleets, won first place and $150,000 at Northwestern University’s annual VentureCat competition on Wednesday.
The startup, co-founded by Kellogg executive MBA candidate Jaime Tabachnik, makes a payments platform to help small- and medium-sized trucking companies in Latin America quickly accept payments.
“We want to help them collect much earlier than the average time, so they have working capital to increase their sales,” Tabachnik said.
Por Adela targets trucking companies that operate anywhere from one to 30 trucks. The startup, founded four years ago and based in Mexico City, has a team of 10. The new funding will be used to invest in Por Adela’s technology.
“We're planning to invest this money into developing more automation for our platform so that we'll focus our resources on growth and customer acquisition to then scale exponentially,” Tabachnik said.
The Equal Opportunity Book Box, a subscription service for diverse children's books that donates one book to an underserved child for every book sold, came in second place, winning $50,000.
Springrose, which designs bras for women with upper mobility or dexterity challenges, won the third place prize of $25,000.
More than 60 teams applied to compete in this year’s VentureCat, with 25 making it to the semi-finals and just six finalists pitching at the virtual event, which was hosted by Melissa Kaufman, the executive director of The Garage at Northwestern.
Throughout the entire competition, Northwestern gave out $325,000 in non-dilutive prize money. The funds this year were primarily supplied from the Levy Institute for Entrepreneurial Practice and Lanny and Sharon Martin. Lanny is a longtime trustee of Northwestern and earned his bachelors in 1968 and his JD from Northwestern's School of Law in 1973.
In 2020, Gearflow, a startup building an online construction equipment marketplace, won first place at the VentureCat.
