Fitzelerate winners announced

Tuesday night saw the Grand Final of this year’s Fitzelerate competition - with six teams pitching their projects to the panel of judges. The field was so impressive that the judges chose to award this year's £5,000 prize jointly to FREENOW and Rapid X.

Following on the success of last year’s inaugural Fitzelerate, this year we were delighted to see six very strong teams proceed through to the Grand Final.  

Fitzelerate is a student entrepreneurship competition designed to provide an opportunity for Fitzwilliam students to develop or enhance their skills and experience in an increasingly entrepreneurial world. The competition was open to all students from Fitzwilliam College, or to teams of students of which at least one member is a Fitzwilliam student.

This year’s finalists included a student food delivery company, a data management/collation business, a biotech research investment tool, and a sustainable restaurant inventory management system. 

The successful teams were FREENOW established by two Fitz second years Oliver Mosheim and Raymond Erewunm and Boxuan Tang (Imperial College London), who are creating a mobile app that blocks or filters content across an individual’s social media platforms; and Rapid X - a diagnostic healthcare testing system developed by Nipun Sawhney (Fitzwilliam PG) and Dr Shuler Xu (https://rapidx.bio/)

The judges found it very difficult to select a winner and were pleased to split the funding jointly.

Professor Kourosh Saeb-Parsy, Chair of the Judging panel and Fellow of Fitzwilliam College commented: ”The judges were impressed by the high quality of the teams in this year's competition and the diversity of ideas presented.  We saw creativity and ambition in the winning projects - both innovative solutions to problems facing us, one relating to the use of social media and the other relating to diagnostic testing".