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OU Business Student Start-Up Recognized as One of the World's 20 Hottest Start-Ups by CNBC

Driven Anayltics

NORMAN – Driven Analytics, a mobile application for car owners developed by a University of Oklahoma business student and his colleagues, was recognized this week as one of the world’s 20 hottest start-ups of 2014 by CNBC.

The start-up, developed by Professional Master of Business Administration student Stephen Soroosh, provides a driver real-time diagnostics specific to their car usage. The venture was formulated by Soroosh and his peers, Professional MBA students Jake Elliott, Mitchell Walser and Rachel Webb.

“The idea for Driven Analytics really started during Professor Matt Jensen's Information Technology class, where I started dreaming up potential solutions enabled by information technology for problems that my business partners and I were having with a failing used car dealership we had launched a year earlier,” said Soroosh.

“I remember bouncing some ideas off of Jake Elliott, who is now our Chief Technology Officer, during a class break. From there, things really started to snowball as Mitchell Walser and Rachel Webb got involved, and we took the idea through the Lean Launchpad methodology in our Strategic Venture Development class with Professor Ron Bolen and Jim Bratton, executive director of the OU Office of Technology Development.”

In late October, Driven Analytics was named one of the 50 most innovative start-ups by Global Entrepreneurship Week.

“This latest recognition by CNBC added to the earlier acknowledgment by Global Entrepreneurship Week is really huge, as we have been testing our hardware and software all summer and fall and are starting to look for the right investors to help us finish proving the model and scale the business,” said Soroosh. “This kind of recognition really helps to validate our concept and all the work we have done up to this point.”

Programs in the Michael F. Price College of Business at OU have achieved national recognition. The Center for Entrepreneurship is ranked a top five program at the undergraduate level by The Princeton Review and a top 20 program at the graduate level. The MBA Program is ranked in the top 10 by CollegeAtlas.org in terms of affordability, academic quality, accessibility, GMAT average and job placement rate. The Professional MBA Program at Price College recently began offering its program in newly renovated facilities at OU’s Oklahoma City campus in the University’s Research Park, located just minutes from downtown and the state capitol.