Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Boston startups win Global Entrepreneurship Week competition

By Michelle Lang

Boston is well represented at Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW) 2011, which began Monday. Two local entrepreneurs – Kavita Shukla, founder of Fenugreen, and Jason Ethier, founder of Dynamo Micropower – took grand prize honors at the Startup Open, a startup competition. The winners were decided from judges’ perceptions of the startups’ growth projections, concept and industry knowledge.

Fenugreen and Dynamo Micropower were chosen from the GEW 50, a list of “50 of the most promising ventures from around the world,” according to the Startup Open website.  Among the 50, local startups Genii of Boston,  and Zoom of Cambridge.

Shukla’s Fenugreen is focused on delivering patented, all-natural, biodegradable food packaging that extends the shelf-life of fresh produce. The packaging is expected to help lower costs associated with transportation, inventory and energy. As a grand prize winner of the Startup Open, Shukla will attend the Global Entrepreneurship Congress in Liverpool in March 2012, all expenses paid. The Cambridge startup was chosen earlier this month as one of Mass High Tech’s “Five you should follow” companies.

Jason Ethier formed Dynamo Micropower, a startup hosted in South Boston’s Greentown Labs incubator,  to replace traditional sub-10kW power with its ultra-micro turbine architecture. As a grand prize winner, he will receive a year of mentoring from Michael DeLazzer and Biju Kulathaka, serial entrepreneurs and founding members of Redbox.

Global Entrepreneurship Week was founded in 2008 by Kauffman Foundation president and CEO Carl Schramm and former U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The designated week aims to celebrate entrepreneurs with events, networking and competitions to spur more innovation.

The Startup Open competition, which began in 2010, is open to entrepreneurs who have either launched, become incorporated as a company, completed a first sale or landed outside funding since the previous year’s GEW.