This year, the only Massachusetts student startup that made it to final rounds of Student Startup Madness - the nationwide tournament-style competition for student-led digital media startups, culminating with finals at South By Southwest - is out of the Medford campus at Tufts University.
Worksense, a messaging monitoring software that helps organizations understand how their employees are feeling at the workplace, is not a new face on the stage of pitch competitions. Last year, it was among the finalists of MassChallenge Rhode Island — they didn't win, but decided to take things more seriously after that experience, co-founder Timi Dayo-Kayode explained.
The reason why Dayo-Kayode started Worksense is a very personal one. As a computer science and economics major at Tufts, he was one of only a few black people in a class of over 50 students.
"That feeling of feeling out of place... I started thinking about how I could help address this issue and get more people of color into tech," Dayo-Kayode said.
In the U.S., only 3.6 percent of engineering bachelor's degrees are awarded to black and African American students, according to the American Society for Engineering Education. As they enter the job market, this already limited pool of talent takes that "feeling of feeling out of place" from the classroom to the workplace, leading some to decide to leave the field altogether.
With that dreadful scenario in mind, Dayo-Kayode teamed up with co-founder Kevin Destin, a Tufts junior studying computer engineering, to prevent black STEM professionals from having issues in the workplace. Overtime, the mission broadened to "how do we prevent people in general from having issues in the workplace?"
Worksense's software monitors the mood of office workers by leveraging data from the public conversations they have on Slack and translating them into "trending topics," similar to Twitter's. From these insights, for example, employers might understand that something happened during a meeting they didn't attend, and take appropriate actions to address concerns.
Right now, the software works as a Slack integration, but Dayo-Kayode said they're working on integrating other work communication channels such as Workplace by Facebook. As for customers, Worksense is talking with Boston-based video hosting service Whistia to launch a beta.
With the rest of the "Entrepreneurial Eight," as the the teams that have been chosen for the National Championship finals are called, Worksense will pitch to a judging panel made of entrepreneurs and investors on March 11 in Austin, Texas, as part of SXSW network of conferences and festivals.
For Dayo-Kayode, the biggest competitor for Worksense at the National Championship will be Resonado, an audio speaker designed at the University of Notre Dame.
"It's the company that, I think, would give us the biggest run for our money in terms of the progress they've made to date and the potential the product they're working on has," he said.
