It was not his first time participating in the Olin Cup, but the young Washington University alum was greeted with a much different result than last time.

Eric Elias, who graduated with a degree in finance in 2007, took part in the competition in his senior year, but ran into technical issues that kept his group from being successful. This year, he was a member of SoMoLend—a peer-to-peer lending website that was one of the three teams to win this year’s start-up competition sponsored by the University’s Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies. The prize was a $50,000 investment from the center.

The site, which Elias’ team is pitching to different regional investors over coming weeks, aims to link lending institutions to local businesses.

“It’s kind of like micro-lending, but for communities,” explained Ken Harrington, director of the Skandalaris Center. “It allows people to potentially form those relationships in a local economy … it serves a function that we’ve lost with the institutionalization of banks.”

The win in this year’s competition allowed SoMoLend to hire Elias as a full-time team member, as its director of product management.

“It was a $50,000 award, and we basically turned over that award to make a hire,” said SoMoLend Founder and CEO Candace Klein. “So we now have a full time employee committed to improving our technology and maximizing our customer experience.”

This year was the first time that three different teams won the competition, with the Skandalaris Center awarding more than $150,000, about double the normal amount. Harrington said many students took part in the competition, including one student team that won a $5,000 cash prize.

“I suspect probably 50% [of the participants] were students,” he said. “A lot of the teams are supported by students.”

Although the business is based in Cincinnati, Elias said it will continue to have a hold in the St. Louis community.

“I think our product development is going to happen in Cincinnati but the company and the platform we’re building will continue expanding, including working with St. Louis area investors as well as lending institutions,” he said.

Elias’ involvement in the St. Louis entrepreneurial community has included lecturing at the Nexus Leadership Program and serving as a mentor at the recent StartUp Weekend St. Louis, where individuals and teams met downtown to develop novel web-based or mobile applications in groups.

Junior Stan Rosenthal, a member of the Washington University Technology Entrepreneurs (WUTE) who worked with Elias over the weekend to develop an application to contact Congress-people through Twitter, said Elias has come to speak with the group and is continuing to stay in contact.

“We had an event last week where we had three alumni fly in to talk about their start-up—Schoology—so Eric came to that,” Rosenthal said. “We’re planning on continuing on our StartUp Weekend project [and] he’ll definitely keep in the loop with WUTE events.”