Styrofoam wins TBC Startup Fest 2023

Kathmandu: The team “Composting the Expanded Polystyrene (Styrofoam)” has won the  TBC Startup Fest 2023.

The final of the TBC Startup Fest 2023 took place at the Himalaya Hotel on Sunday.

With the top ten teams pitching their ideas, at the end of the day, three were victorious, with the team “Composting the Expanded Polystyrene (Styrofoam)” succeeding to secure first place.

Organized by The British College Incubation Centre, the TBC Startup Fest is an opportunity for students from around the country to present their entrepreneurial ideas and compete for prize money to invest in their startups. The competition started on the 21st of July with 50 students from colleges around Nepal pitching their ideas and ten of these were then chosen for the finals.

Each of the ten winning ideas then had to form teams of five from the original 50 students to create teams and work on their final pitches. These teams then attended mentoring sessions on the 22nd of July with esteemed external experts and TBC professors, who helped them to hone their business ideas and create presentations.

The final day of the event then began with keynote speeches from distinguished guests, Prof. Tim Gocher OBE and Dr. Pukar Malla, before the final teams presented their ideas before the expert judges – Sneh Rajbhandari, Ashutosh Dixit, Amit Agrawal, and the Deputy Principal of The British College, Dr. Patrick McCrudden.

The teams presented a dynamic range of business ideas that focussed on innovation, impact, and sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and at the end of the day, three teams were announced as the winners. In third place, securing 50,000 NPR was Team “Bio-Enzyme”, with their innovative bio enzyme cleaning products; in second place, winning 75,000 NPR was

“Team Harvest Grow Investment” focussed on recruiting investors for the Nepali farming industry, and then in the first place was “Composting the Expanded Polystyrene (Styrofoam)”. The team, led by Radhik Thapa, put forward their business idea to recycle and reuse styrofoam using mealworms as a process of decomposition. As well as winning 1 Lakh investment money, this team, along with all of the other winners, now has full access to TBC’s Incubation Centre, which will give them invaluable support in growing their businesses further.

Sunita Basnet, The Head of the Business School at TBC, said of the event, ‘The British College aims to contribute to the startup and entrepreneurial ecosystem of Nepal and the Startup Fest is part of this aim. As an academic institution that delivers curricula related to enterprise, impact, and SDGs, we need to give a platform to young audiences to turn their thoughts into reality. That is why we aim to host this event annually and would like to collaborate with even more academic institutions and industries in the future.’