Solavicta, a company that aims to produce the lowest cost solar power generation equipment in the world, won the Texas round of the Moot Corp® Competition, the new venture competition hosted annually at the McCombs School of Business.

The Solavicta team members are David McParland and Franklin Fuchs, both Texas MBAs in the Class of 2010. Solavicta's win earns them a berth in the Global Moot Corp Competition May 6-8 in Austin. They also win the Austin Technology Incubator Launch Package, which offers strategic business consulting services and mentoring from a team of industry experts, office space and access to discounted legal, accounting and businesses services.

“The best part about the competition is that somewhere in the middle of preparing for it, your simple idea or school project suddenly becomes real-a truly viable venture," said McParland. "This process gets you from 'I'd like to start a company one day' to 'I'm going to start a company now.'"

Solavicta is developing a solar technology that can be manufactured for less than $0.50 per watt. This will allow the creation of fully-installed, grid-ready power systems for 25% less than the leading utility-scale solar power technologies.

The Moot Corp Competition simulates the process of raising venture capital. Judges function as an investment group seeking to reach consensus on the business venture they would most likely fund. The judges base their decision on the quality of the idea, the strength of the management team and the clarity and persuasiveness of the written plan and oral presentation. This year’s judges were a group of 11 former Texas Moot Corp competitors. Solavicta competed with four other finalists in the Texas round of the 2010 competition that included: 

• Ordoro is a simple, web-based order management software for small online retailers. Ordoro's goal is to improve the business productivity on back-end order fulfillment activities; thus allowing the business owner to focus on critical front-end revenue generation activities. Jagath Narayan, Sangram Kadam and Naruby Schlenker are MBAs, Class of 2010.
• MBAbenchmark enables MBAs to benchmark themselves against their peers, research hiring trends and find compelling job opportunities while giving recruiters an effective way to quickly filter, rank and connect with candidates according to custom criteria. Kathleen Voboril, Randall Crowder, Conor Collins and Aaron Butler are MBAs, Class of 2010.
• Digital Proctor is revolutionizing online education with a novel internet identification technology.  Andrew Mills is a Ph.D., computer science and Hyunji Lim is earning her master's in biomedical engineering, Class of 2010.
• Mentionables is a high-quality, everyday undergarment line that caters to the underserved plus-size women’s market. Using a direct sales approach, they hope to provide a comfortable, positive shopping experience where the average-sized American woman can purchase well-fitting and sexy undergarments. Jennifer Minelli, Kate Duncan, Jenna Goldman, Liz Wetterhahn and Megan Campe are MBAs, Class of 2010.