Koan, Founded by Equitech Scholars, Wins $14,000 at the McGill Dobson Cup

Equitech Futures is thrilled to celebrate a landmark achievement for Koan, the AI-powered learning platform co-founded by members of our 2025 Equitech Scholars cohort. At this year's McGill Dobson Cup, Koan claimed second prize on the Social Enterprise Track and received the Avmor Prize for Social Responsibility, bringing the team's competition winnings to $14,000.

The pitch was delivered by Chidiebere Okarah, a 2025 Equitech Scholar from Canada and McGill University student, who took the stage alone for the closed-door finals before a panel of six expert judges. Every member of the Koan founding team completed the Equitech Futures Institute in residence at the University of Oxford during the summer of 2025. What began as a collaboration forged during that program has since grown into a venture reaching schools on multiple continents.

The McGill Dobson Cup is the flagship competition of the Dobson Centre for Entrepreneurship at McGill's Desautels Faculty of Management, and one of Canada's most prestigious university pitch competitions. Powered by National Bank, it distributes over $200,000 in prizes across four tracks — health sciences, technology, environment, and social impact — to early-stage startups iterating their MVPs and preparing to launch. Entry requires completing the Dobson Bootcamp, a structured multi-week program of workshops and mentorship that precedes the competition itself.

For Chidi, entering was itself an unexpected turn. A McGill interdisciplinary research committee pointed her toward the Dobson as the right home for her proposal. What followed was an eight-week bootcamp of structured weekly workshops covering everything from business planning and IP protection to pitch craft and funding strategy. The preparation proved essential.

The final pitch was a five-minute presentation followed by ten minutes of questions from the judges. Chidi felt simultaneously excited and apprehensive about what the questions might be. "I'm not working too much on the technical product side," she explained, "and so I had done quite a bit of research in the weeks leading up to it. It really helped make me feel more comfortable, so there wasn't really a question that I was unprepared for." 

When Koan's name was called for second prize, carrying a check for $12,000, the reaction was instinctive: "I gasped, and it echoed through the room, actually!"

The Avmor Prize for Social Responsibility arrived as a second shock of the evening. Established in 2003 through the generosity of Mr. Avrum Morrow, the $2,000 prize recognises outstanding students competing in the Dobson Cup who focus their efforts on social responsibility, a distinction Koan earned without Chidi even knowing she was competing for it. "I did not know of this specific award, and so receiving this one felt like a validation of the good work that Koan does," she said.

The wins at the McGill Dobson Cup add to Koan’s track record of success, after winning £7,500 in prize money at the Kevin Xu Innovation Challenge, part of the Rhodes Forum on Technology & Society at the University of Oxford.

Koan co-founder Bo Liu, a 2025 Equitech Scholar from China, reflected on the journey from Oxford to this moment. He described the path as one shaped by the diversity of the team itself. "Without Manas Tiwari and Eduardo Oliveira, we wouldn't have our incredible slide deck, and without Chidi, we wouldn’t have any of the research," he said. "Everyone is resourceful and everyone is complementary in that regard." Chidi put it simply: "Sometimes the Koan team feels like The Avengers. Everyone's really great at doing a specific thing."

The prize funding will go directly toward what the team needs most: the LLM infrastructure and cloud costs required to build and deploy the product, and the API capacity to sustain their first pilot programs. Koan has already secured partnerships with schools across the United States and, through co-founder Mateo Morales's network, with institutions in Ecuador and Peru. "Once we get two, we can get two to the power of five," Bo said of the team's expansion ambitions.

Neither founder had imagined, twelve months ago, that the summer in Oxford would lead them here. "The Equitech Futures Institute was one of the biggest highlights of my 2025," Chidi said. "I could have never expected that I, or any of the other members of the team, would be here. It's a testament to the fact that you never know what will happen from experiences."

Congratulations to Chidi, Bo, and the entire Koan team on this extraordinary achievement!