Nandita Balaji
Title: Co-founder & COO of InfernoGuard
Age: 20
Nandita Balaji began her entrepreneurship journey in high school after hearing about wildfires in the Appalachian Mountains near her school in Charlotte, North Carolina.
After learning more about the danger that wildfires pose for communities, she realized there was no method in place for early wildfire detection. Balaji worked to create a solution with classmates at Providence Day School, building a preliminary prototype for an early wildfire detection platform.
While at Johns Hopkins University, Balaji worked with her co-founders Kevin Kaspar, Zoe Sherman, and Shreyas Bhasin to turn her science project into InfernoGuard. The company analyzes a landlord's property to identify high-risk areas and then installs hardware to continuously look for wildfires.
The now 14-person team, spread across multiple universities, has raised over $420,000 in a variety of pitch competitions across the country.
Has it been hard to balance creating a startup while being a full-time student? It’s not easy — balancing being a full-time student with the sporadic and urgent demands of building a startup is a uniquely challenging journey. There have been millions of times when I’ve struggled to balance school and the startup; whether it's having an exam and an important presentation on the same day, asking for extensions because of last-minute startup conflicts, or many late nights to make sure the work gets done. And, realistically, there are plenty of times when it doesn’t, and that’s when I can turn to my co-founders and friends to help out. Yet, having the chance to blend academic experiences with my entrepreneurial toolkit is the most rewarding experience. No classroom quite matches the high-impact, real-world work of entrepreneurship, and I’ve learned so many invaluable skills through this firsthand experience that I’m able to apply to academics. Overall, while this combination is challenging, it's so worth it.
How have you used the capital you’ve gotten so far? What advice do you have for other young founders who are trying to raise capital? We’re so grateful for the capital we’ve raised in our journey — this has laid the foundation for our team to build out our product, invest in our team and prepare our solution for market.
To other young founders trying to raise capital, the best advice I can give is to stay rooted in your mission and don’t be afraid to ask for help, whether it’s from a professor, industry mentor, teammate or friend. Entrepreneurship is insanely confusing! If someone had told me my freshman year of high school that our science competition project would turn into a real startup, I wouldn’t have believed it because building a company is such a daunting task. Through the years, though, I’ve learned that our most successful strategy in this journey has always been to ask for help when we need it. Whether it's recruiting a friend who’s never heard your pitch before to give feedback, storyboarding a pitch with a co-founder for hours until it seems to flow, countless conversations with customers to better understand the market, or getting feedback from many mentors to build out a revenue model, the most valuable resource around you is learning from other people who’ve gone through the same challenges before. Every entrepreneur faces a unique journey, but the easiest way to navigate it is to find resources and people to guide you through the process!
The other co-founders are at different universities. How have you managed to maintain collaborations with them despite the distance? The distance between us has been challenging but made our founding process unique. There’s definitely an adjustment period every time one of us goes to school at a different time of year, or it seems like we’re all dealing with endless midterm weeks. Especially building a business rooted in hardware, it’s raised unique challenges in the prototyping process. However, we’ve been able to adapt and shape our company’s workflow around remote collaboration. As a founding team, we graduated high school in 2020 during the peak of the pandemic. With this, we were able to lean into the newfound ability to collaborate remotely across universities. Hours and hours of zoom calls, shared google documents and slack messages later, we’ve learned to use the distance between us as a strength instead of a weakness. We’ve been able to build an intercollegiate team from multiple universities including Johns Hopkins University, Northwestern University and Lehigh University. The incredible resources and support we’ve received from these institutions, especially accelerators and mentorship at JHU’s FastForwardU, have allowed our team to expand and flourish as we make progress towards our mission.
To read about the rest of our Inno Under 25 class, click here.
