We spoke to the 3 winning teams chosen by the jury and audience. Alicja Rudawy, Laurens van Campen, and Marom Sverdlov and Oliver van Erven to talk about their business plans, their most valuable experience from the challenge, and what their next step will be.

Can you briefly explain what your business plan entails?

Alicja: 'Amsterdam is slowly moving cars out of its centre, and bikes are becoming the main way to get around. Rixa is an app for booking an electric bike taxi at night, when the trams have stopped and taxis are hard to find. Bike taxis in Amsterdam can only take rides booked in advance, so we help drivers and passengers find each other.'

Laurens: ‘Tulip is a research institute on women's safety in the Netherlands. Most everyday incidents, such as street harassment or being followed, are never reported, so they never show up in the data. We want to close that gap: first with a large national survey, then with an app for continuous reporting, and finally by turning the data into concrete proposals for municipalities, such as better lighting and safer cycling routes.’

Marom and Oliver: ‘Guardian Agent is a desktop application that parents install onto their children's devices. It is able to listen to and watch the child's game play across all platforms and detect grooming behavior in real time. For example a stranger trying to meet up with their child, get sensitive information about them, make sexual comments towards them, etc. This is powered by a local LLM that we developed ourselves, capable of detecting grooming behavior accurately while running completely on the child's device meaning the actual conversations are never sent to any servers.’

What was the most valuable experience you took away from the challenge?

Laurens: ‘Pitching to an audience and seeing how strongly people recognised the problem. Winning the Audience Award showed us that this is not a niche issue but a societal one, and that gave us a lot of confidence to keep going.’

Marom and Oliver: ‘The most valuable thing was having the opportunity to pitch our idea so many times and to so many experts from different fields. Every time we got a lot of feedback and were able to refine our pitch and product more and more. By the end of the challenge we had developed a super clear, concise pitch that we then also used to convince parents to try Guardian Agent out.’

Alicja: 'The feedback from the experts made me change course: instead of owning the bikes ourselves, Rixa now works with drivers who already have them. The workshops on financing and testing whether people actually want your product were the most useful part for me.'

What will be your next step?

Marom and Oliver: ‘We are currently improving our product based on live feedback we are getting from pilot parents that are using the beta. Once we are happy with the improvements we will release it, and use the money we won at the Impact Challenge to market it and get it in front of as many parents as possible, these parents will then hopefully become our first paid customers.’

Laurens: ‘We are now looking for an academic partner to co-design the survey and get it through ethics review. Alongside that, we are preparing a short pilot survey to test reach and interest.’

Alicja: 'First, I’m looking for a technical co-founder. After that, we’ll bring more bike taxi operators on board and launch the app, starting with Saturday nights around Leidseplein.’

Curious? Read more about the UvA Impact ChallengeExternal link