XClose

UCL Campaign

Home
Menu

UCL students have won $1 million in seed-funding from international Hult Prize

3 October 2018

Four UCL undergraduates have won the international Hult Prize after conceiving a rice drying business that will not only reduce millions of tons of rice wastage, but also help alleviate poverty.

UCL Hult Prize Winners with former President Bill Clinton

Former US President Bill Clinton presented UCL’s winning team with $1 million in start-up funding in New York City in September. 

The UCL team won the chance to pitch at the global finals having beaten 200,000 other groups over the course of the year-long Hult Prize programme.

The 2018 challenge was to build a sustainable, scalable social enterprise that harnessed the power of energy to transform the lives of 10 million people. The winning idea does this by disrupting the traditional rice supply chain in Southeast Asia.

The social enterprise, SunRice, buys rice directly from farmers and dries it using renewable energy - avoiding the 30% spoilage rate farmers would normally incur when attempting to treat the rice themselves.

Bringing together cross-faculty expertise from biomedical sciences, statistical sciences and economics, the UCL team of Kisum Chan, Lincoln Lee, Julia Vannaxay and Vannie Koay, were supported by Innovation and Enterprise and the School of Management at UCL. 

The team is now working to put the money to good use by rolling out more pilot schemes to add to those already taking place in Malaysia and Myanmar in partnership with the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI).

Read more about the prize winners here.

Read more about the Hult Prize here.