Haru wins Ulster University Students’ Union Shark Tank competition

by Startacus Admin

Haru Ltd, a third-party platform to enable charity shops to accurately price, upload and sell items online wins the Ulster University Students’ Union Shark Tank competition 2019.

The winner of the Ulster University Students’ Union Shark Tank competition was announced last night at the glittering UUSU Student Excellence Awards held at the Glenavon House Hotel in Cookstown.

Jacques Hill Co-founder of Haru Ltd and Final Year Accountancy student at UU won the first prize of £2,500 start-up capital and a fully funded trip to attend the Start-up World Cup Grand Final in San Francisco on the 17^th May 2019.

Haru Ltd is a third-party platform with a variety of features that enable charity shops to accurately price, upload and sell items online. The platform uses proprietary algorithms to guide users on what price to list items at online and instore based on demand, quality and rarity of the item. From the Haru app shop volunteers and full-time staff can then upload an item, which is published to a variety of e-commerce platforms where it has the best chance of selling. Resulting in a simple and effective e-commerce solution for charity shops.

The competition is organised by the UUSU Enterprise Centre which helps Ulster University students achieve their ambitions through a range of programmes, resources, advice sessions and funding opportunities. This year a wide variety of applications were submitted from across all UU campuses. Ranging from a zero-waste food shops and augmented reality applications for the tourism industry to others that have already secured 6 figure investments.

On 20^th March the 10 finalists pitched to the panel of sharks at the Riverside Theatre on their Coleraine Campus. The panel of sharks included Jennifer McWilliams, Manager at Antrim Enterprise Agency; Gillian McColgan, Chief Technology Officer at Hilco IP Merchant Bank USA; Terry Canning, Founder of Farmwizard & BBC Dragons Den contestant; William Carson, Santander Business Relationship Manager and Jonathan Wallace, Professor of Innovation at Ulster University.

New to the competition this year was the introduction of a runner up prize of £1,500. It was announced last night that student co-founders John Madine a Final Year Marketing student and Laura Doonan a Final Year Computer Science student won this prize for their innovative hospitality start up called ‘Serve Me’.

Jacques and his Co-Founder Sam will be join members of the UUSU Enterprise Centre and UU Research & Impact teams in San Francisco in May, where they will be supporting Ulster University portfolio company Axial 3D who will be competing for the $1,000,000 grand prize at the Start Up World Cup Grand Finale 2019.

We'd be encouraging Haru, Serve Me, and all the 10 finalists to also apply to upSTART the startup pitch competition at Digital DNA Belfast - which this year features an all-expenses paid trip to explore the NEW YORK tech scene for the winning Northern Irish startup! 

To keep up to date with enterprise activity and innovative start ups from UU students and graduates; follow @uusu_enterprise on Twitter.

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• #ulster university
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• #charities
• #charity shops
• #haru

Published on: 3rd April 2019