Using Her MBA Experience as a Business Launchpad

Growing up with a diabetic father, Tosin Alabi ’25 MBA was acutely aware of the dangers of foot ulcers for people with diabetes. Although her father never experienced the ailment, Alabi remembers the fear and care taken whenever he needed his toenails clipped. Her father died from complications of diabetes when she was in high school. Now, the Nigerian-born MBA student is poised to disrupt diabetes care through a smart sock bandage that helps detect early signs of diabetic foot ulcer. 

The product, developed by Alabi’s health tech startup, Diabetech, is past the prototype stage and Alabi is in talks with manufacturers who might mass produce it for clinical trial. She raised $40,000 last semester alone, winning five of eight entrepreneurial pitch contests she entered, including $25,000 at Whitman’s Orange Tank competition and $5,000 at the Orange Innovation competition. 

“Last semester was very stressful for me, between juggling academics, working 20 hours a week, and pitching my business,” she says. 

But Alabi has a vision to revolutionize diabetes care while building a business and creating jobs. It’s a mission inspired by her father’s fight against diabetes and what brought her to the Whitman School. 

Alabi earned an undergraduate degree in software engineering and a master’s in information technology and worked for more than a decade as a business analyst and consultant, her last position with Deloitte. But she had her own business idea she wanted to pursue and sought out an MBA program to fuse her interests in business and technology and to provide a foundation to bring her idea to fruition.  

Alabi discovered Syracuse University while googling MBA and Ph.D. in information technology. She applied to Whitman’s MBA program and was accepted, but Syracuse seemed very far away from Nigeria. In the midst of weighing her options, Alabi’s mother had a flat tire and the worker that came to the house to fix it showed up wearing a Syracuse t-shirt with the image of Otto the Orange. “I decided that was a sign and I should accept my offer,” she says. 

She couldn’t be happier with that decision. At Whitman, Alabi has been supported in carving out her own path. To augment her MBA curriculum, she has built a network of entrepreneurial mentors and created opportunities to help her achieve her goals.  

That included independent study courses with adjunct professor Eric Alderman, an attorney who has launched several small businesses, and Linda Dickerson-Hartsock, founder and former executive director of the Blackstone LaunchPad at Syracuse who has extensive experience in entrepreneurship. “Working with professors one-on-one, you have their full attention and it allowed me to build my business faster,” Alabi says.  

She also got a job working 20 hours a week as the entrepreneur in residence at the Couri Hatchery, the Whitman School student business incubator, which provided her resources and support in preparing for pitch competitions. 

Last year, Alabi was selected to participate in a regional National Science Foundation I-Corps Innovation Course at Syracuse aimed to help researchers bridge the gap between laboratory discoveries and commercial applications.  

“That experience helped me confirm that the market for this product is real. The rate of diabetic amputation is pretty high and amputation costs thousands and could be prevented at a fraction of the cost with the device,” she says.  

That’s not just self-confidence talking. Alabi applied for and was awarded permanent U.S. citizenship through an EB-1A visa, better known as an Einstein visa, given to foreign nationals who exhibit exceptional abilities in their field of expertise.  

In her final semester at Syracuse, Alabi is conducting a second independent study course with Dickerson-Hartsock, intending to apply for a patent and get her product to the point that it is ready for a clinical trial.