Team:AQA Unesp/Entrepreneurship



iGEM AQA_Unesp

entrepreneurship


Our team was selected over 80 teams to participate in the pre-acceleration program BioStartup Lab. BioStartup Lab is an initiative from Biominas Brazil and Sebrae Minas to accelerate the emergence of startups in human health, digital health, agrobusiness, animal health and environment.

We participated in the 3rd edition of BioStartup Lab, held in Sao Paulo City, which 21 startups working with human health and digital health were selected to participate in the 10-week program. The program offered mentorships and networking with life sciences startups and big pharmaceutical companies.


Our main goal participating in this program was to learn about entrepreneurship, how we could make our project, Insubiota, a real product and commercialize it or sell it to a pharmaceutical company. In the first weeks of the program, we learned how to build a canvas and a business model for our product. After many mentorships and works we had our first canvas.


Lean Canvas is based on the business model canvas, however its design is also based in risky factors commonly experienced in the early stages of a startup.

In these weeks we were also trained on how to pitch for investors. After 4 weeks from the beginning of the program, we did our first pitch to investors and evaluators, who selected the top 15 teams to continue in the program. Our team was successful and we continued in the program!

In this new stage of the program, our work and mentorships were focused on legal and financial issues and intellectual property. On the BSL final “demo day” we had the opportunity to meet many investors and big pharmaceutical companies leaders and talk about our project. This was one of the most enriching experiences in our business career, and all the knowledges we learned were useful for the development of a business mind.



One of the most important things that we learned by participating in the BioStartup Lab was knowing some tools for project management and teamwork. We were introduced to the Scrum methodology and started to use it in our project. This was particularly useful to help us in critical moments when we had a lot of work, for exemple the days before the wiki freeze, allowing us to better delegate and accomplish our tasks easier.

Our board using the Scrum methodology during the work for the wiki freeze.

Team: AQA_Unesp