Greater Philadelphia’s next generation of entrepreneurs is imaginative, ambitious, collaborative, tech-savvy and focused on social impact.
They are creating first-of-their-kind products and looking to tackle some of society’s most pressing issues. They have won pitch competitions, attracted investors and brought products to market — all in a quarter of a century or less on this planet.
PHL Inno is proud to recognize 16 individuals as this year’s Inno Under 25 honorees. Now in its fourth year, Inno Under 25 highlights individuals 25 years of age and younger who are making a positive impact on the region through innovation. To determine the list, we sought nominations from the public and also considered candidates identified from past reporting.
Greater Philadelphia’s rich higher education scene has been a catalyst for many of these individuals’ entrepreneurial journeys. Some members of this year’s class are recent graduates while others are still undertaking their studies. Some aren’t out of high school yet and are already making waves.
Collectively, they are out to disrupt multiple sectors, including technology, carbon capture, education and even the fashion industry.
In the profiles below, get to know more about each of our Inno Under 25 honorees.
CEO, Fundwurx Inc.
Age: 23
Company headquarters: Philadelphia
Industry: Human resources
In his short time in the investment industry, Ben Ford was part of the social impact team as an intern at investment management giant Blackstone that built a dashboard intended to track corporate social responsibility metrics. After its successful launch in 2022, Ford struck out on his own to launch Fundwurx. The startup gives companies an all-in-one platform to help manage and track their corporate social responsibility objectives. Its analytics dashboard can display progress on volunteer hours, dollar amounts donated by employees, corporate gift matching and more. It also connects companies with vetted charities that they can support. An alum of Upper Dublin High School, Ford studied at Syracuse University, where he graduated in 2023. During his time at Syracuse, Ford was a mentor at the Blackstone Launchpad, the university’s innovation and entrepreneurship hub, where he also won two innovation awards. He has since returned to Greater Philadelphia, where Fundwurx is based. The company was accepted into the competitive Techstars Oakland accelerator program in 2023, raising $220,000 in the process. Ford used that funding to launch Fundwurx’s beta product in October and brought on one of the largest small business administration lenders in the country, Pursuit Lending, as its first customer.
Agustin Garcinuno, Haley Kang, Catherine Liu and Tavi Kim
co-founders, Flipkit
Ages: 22
Company headquarters: Philadelphia
Industry: Retail software
Four University of Pennsylvania students turned their passion for fashion — and specifically the quest to find second-hand and vintage clothing — into a tech startup. What began as a hobby is today a business known as Flipkit. The four founders say the platform is the first all-in-one software for second-hand clothing businesses. Flipkit says its platform can reduce the work associated with selling a second-hand garment by 90%. It uses artificial intelligence to assist sellers in listing a piece on a marketplace, negotiating the price and making an offer to a buyer for that item. The platform allows users to upload numerous photos of clothing at once, automatically fills in item descriptions and gives users the ability to cross-list items on different online marketplaces. It is currently integrated with eight marketplaces, including Etsy, Mercari, eBay, Poshmark and Facebook Marketplace. Flipkit also has a dashboard that tracks metrics such as sales, inventory value and best-selling categories. It offers tiered monthly subscription plans based on items uploaded and inventory. Flipkit, currently in beta mode, was chosen as a semifinalist for Penn Venture Lab’s Startup Challenge in 2024. The second-hand clothing market is a rapidly expanding sector, growing at 15 times the pace of the traditional retail market in 2023, according to a study from ThredUp, an online consignment store. The market, which Flipkit is trying to corner, is expected to more than double by 2028 to $37 billion.
Alexandre Imbot and Eli Moraru
co-founders, The Community Grocer
Ages: 25 and 23
Company headquarters: Philadelphia
Industry: Nonprofit
Alexandre Imbot and Eli Moraru are bringing a new kind of corner store to Philadelphia through their nonprofit. The Community Grocer is set to open its pilot location on the corner of 60th Street and Walton Avenue in Cobbs Creek later this year, bringing affordable, nutritious meals to people on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits. Presently, SNAP does not allow recipients to use their benefits on hot, prepared foods, which can be a detriment to those looking for healthy ready-made meals. Imbot, the company’s CEO, and Moraru, the company’s president, found a workaround in which customers buy ingredients at the Community Grocer and the receipt essentially acts as a recipe for their meal. They will be able to keep their groceries or take those items and their receipt to another section of the building run by nonprofit Resident Action Committee II. There, customers can trade in the ingredients they bought for a freshly cooked meal. The University of Pennsylvania graduates’ innovative take on the corner store has been vetted by the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic and was the recipient of Penn’s 2023 President’s Sustainability Prize, which is accompanied by $100,000 in funding. They also received $100,000 toward the project from Philadelphia-based FMC Corp. Through the program, they said they are “reimagining our broken food systems from soil to supper.”
Rohan Kapoor and Jack Reichert
co-founders, Go Green Filter
Ages: 18
Company headquarters: Unionville
Industry: Carbon reduction
Two Unionville High School seniors are looking to conquer one of the world’s most pressing issues: automobile pollution. Cars and small trucks make up close to 17% of all greenhouse gas emissions, or about 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per vehicle annually, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Go Green Filter, founded by Rohan Kapoor and Jack Reichert, is looking to provide an affordable solution. The filter clips onto exhaust pipes to reduce the amount of carbon emissions gas-powered cars release. The filtration device contains water, algae and a light source to create an environment ripe for photosynthesis so carbon dioxide can be converted into oxygen. The company says the filter reduces carbon dioxide by about 74%. It is meant to be a more affordable and accessible alternative to electric vehicles, which account for about 1% of vehicles on the road nationally, according to the Department of Energy. The concept won T-Mobile’s Changemaker Challenge Grand Prize in October, receiving $15,000 in seed funding. It also took first place in its respective category at the World Series of Innovation and Chester County Intermediate Unit’s Invention Convention. They’ve received $35,000 in total winnings. Kapoor and Reichert have applied for a patent on their technology, which has sold more than 700 units so far.
CEO, Athlete Squared
Age: 19
Company headquarters: Villanova
Industry: Sports technology
A longtime football player, Tanner Maddocks didn’t have a personal coach or trainer when he was growing up. Recognizing that access to those kinds of services can be out of reach for many aspiring athletes due to low availability and high costs, he decided to tackle the problem through his startup Athlete Squared. The Villanova University quarterback is taking advantage of the NCAA’s new name, image and likeness rules in an effort to give more young athletes access to personal training from college players — and more college athletes like himself the ability to monetize their skills. On Athlete Squared, college athletes can create and sell training regimens in the form of videos to younger athletes so they can replicate sessions at home. Maddocks, originally from a small town outside of Reading, likened the concept to “creating content that you wish your younger self had.” Athlete Squared has begun onboarding student-athletes to the platform and has struck brand partnerships, including with Kansas State University’s women’s basketball team. This isn’t Maddocks’ first entrepreneurial endeavor. At the age of 16, he launched apparel startup Beaux Brand, and shortly after launched Maddocks NFT, an NFT company that he says scored six-figure profits in six months.
CEO, Veil Street
Age: 23
Company headquarters: Philadelphia
Industry: Fashion
Kady Meite considers herself the inventor of the hoodjab. It’s an innovative, stylish, comfortable approach to the hijab, the head covering traditionally worn by Muslim women. A graduate of West Philadelphia’s Paul Robeson High School and more recently West Chester University, Meite went on to commercialize the product via her company Veil Street, which she founded in 2020. In a nod to modern style, her hoodjab combines a hoodie and hijab and is geared toward revolutionizing a niche in the fashion industry. Three different hoodjab styles retail for between $90 and $95 and are available on Veil Street’s website. Meite also has a men’s line of masked, hooded sweatshirts that retail for $50. Helping drive the business’ growth, Meite uses social media to reach prospective buyers and has amassed some 183,000 followers between Instagram and TikTok. On the latter, she has racked up 6.6 million likes. This isn’t the first content-driven business for Meite, who is the oldest of eight siblings and the daughter of first-generation immigrants from the Ivory Coast. While in high school she founded KYM Cosmetics, a small business that struck partnerships with major industry players like Anastasia Beverly Hills and NYX Cosmetics. She continued the business out of her college dorm before turning her focus to Veil Street.
Phillip Muller and Evan Wilson
co-founders, Scaffold Ed
Ages: 24 and 23
Company headquarters: Philadelphia
Industry: Education technology
Philadelphia-area natives Evan Wilson and Phillip Muller are both products of one of the city’s most prominent youth tech nonprofits, Coded by Kids, which looks to invigorate Philadelphia’s tech workforce pipeline with underrepresented talent. The duo met while working at the nonprofit and were founding members of the organization’s Draft Studios, a web development arm that employs underrepresented student software developers. They began working on the idea behind Scaffold Ed, an education technology platform that simplifies live datasets for schools and school districts, before taking on the concept full-time in 2021. The platform allows educators and administrators to synthesize virtually any information about their students from multiple data sources into reports and dashboards based on any information the school system keeps. The pair worked on the company while at their respective universities: Wilson, the company’s CEO, at the University of Pennsylvania, and Muller, the COO, at Drexel University. In the years since, they have gone through the J.P. Morgan-backed Techstars accelerator in Washington, D.C., and in January were named to the GSV Cup 50, a list from GSV Ventures and Google Cloud of the 50 most innovative digital learning and workforce skills startups from around the world.
founder, Sasas Mix
Age: 24
Company headquarters: Philadelphia
Industry: Food
When Niaka Porte wanted to bring the taste of her family’s native Liberia to America, she began making homemade muffins and loaves of rice bread to sell at pop-ups around Drexel University, where she graduated in 2022. She found the rice bread to be a hit and wanted to expand that reach. As a result, she launched Sasas Mix, what she believes is the first baking mix company for rice bread, a Liberian delicacy. Porte received a $15,000 grant from Drexel’s Charles D. Close School of Entrepreneurship to help fund her venture. The gluten-free, vegan baking mix comes in original for $11.99 or chocolate chip for $12.99. Sasas Mix can be used to make traditional Liberian banana bread, though Porte also offers recipe alternatives on her website that use the mix to make donuts, pancakes and more. The mixes are available online and in a handful of retailers throughout the Northeast. With the business established, Porte has a vision of expanding her offerings to include foods native to other underrepresented countries around the world.
Aiden Tahmazian and Sydney Wiredu
co-founders, Circlez
Ages: 19
Company headquarters: Williamstown, New Jersey
Industry: Software, apps
Aiden Tahmazian and Sydney Wiredu saw their peers experiencing increased levels of burnout as they entered college and wanted to find a solution. In 2022, the longtime friends and South Jersey natives launched Circlez, a social motivation app available on Apple’s App Store. The program allows users to track progress across a number of personalized goals, like exercise, academics and sleep. It has an innate social aspect, as users can challenge one another and see the progress people in their “circle” are also making. For example, a circle could have a group of users each looking to record 10,000 steps in a day, and a leaderboard shows the progress of other members of the group. The duo have built the program out despite being at different universities. Tahmazian attends Rowan University, while Wiredu is enrolled at Harvard University. Tapping into Wiredu’s classmates, they’ve brought on three other Harvard students as software engineers, including Philadelphia native Joseph Oronto-Pratt. The Circlez founders have twice won Rowan’s award for the “Most Promising Venture” in the social category, were selected to represent Harvard at Northeastern University’s inaugural Pitch-A-Thon earlier this month, and have been accepted into the Stanford Startup Society. Moving forward, they plan to work with high schools and colleges in the Northeast to integrate their app into student populations. They also plan to introduce additional features to help create new goals and competitions, as well as a search aspect.
