The Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship announced its latest round of startups participating in its prestigious VentureBridge program.
Located within the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University, the Swartz Center selects startups from an application pool that have a CMU co-founder. Those who make it into the program receive seed funding, office space and access to a vast network of mentors and innovators who work to help the startups scale and take on larger funding rounds in the future.
This year's summer 2022 cohort includes 12 startups, many of which are working to address and solve challenges across industries including climate change-related solutions, legal matters, new forms of finance and digital ownership, among others. Several are based in Pittsburgh, though others call San Francisco or New York home.
All of the startups are also receiving funding — a $25,000 SAFE note, a convertible security, and $40,000 worth of additional benefits — amid a market downturn affecting the entire tech industry, the ripple effects of which are impacting the levels of early-stage funding available to startups.
"We are proud and thrilled to get to work with this set of founders. They are laser-focused on building great businesses with solid fundamentals and most are in closed beta with customers," Namrata Banerjee, senior director of VentureBridge, said in an email statement to Pittsburgh Inno. "Market downturns are a scary time to start a company but these are CMU founders - no stranger to hard work and building efficient, essential solutions. We are excited to support and cheer them in their journeys."
Below are the 12 startups that have been named to the latest cohort in alphabetical order. The Swartz Center provided each startup's respective description for the objective listed.
VentureBridge '22 startups - summer cohort
- Founders: Jay Reddy and Maysam Chamanzar
- Sector: Medical devices
- Objective: Developing a technology that reduces outcome variability and surgical risks during cochlear implantation
- Founders: Manish Agnihotri, Aditya Rathod and Chirag Mehta
- Sector: Legal tech
- Objective: creating an AI-based legal language understanding system that analyzes clause-level risks to review contracts efficiently
- Founders: Rishabh Chatterjee and Aditya Jain
- Sector: FinTech, Web3 and cryptocurrency
- Objective: wants to allow individuals to convert liabilities and future receivables into income-generating assets to then potentially build wealth and create a more holistic financial picture
- Founders: Hannah Sieber and Mark Langer
- Sector: CleanTech/environment
- Objective: decarbonizing cold chain logistics with refrigerant-free, reusable, active cooling containers
- Founders: Rohan Pandya and Raj Tilwa
- Sector: AI, CleanTech, energy and IoT
- Objective: building a spot heating technology utilizing robotics and precision heating to provide a focused beam of heat targeted at people — akin to a spot light, but for heat — for outdoor and indoor use
- Founders: Mya Papolu and Vamsi Nagavarapu
- Sector: Gig economy, marketplace and e-commerce
- Objective: an on-demand social content app that connects brands, especially small businesses, with vetted, everyday ambassadors to create high-quality short-form content such as social video
- Founders: Alex Cusell and Yunfan Jiang
- Sector: Retail, commerce, AR/VR and direct-to-consumer
- Objective: with Jisell, gift card givers can fully customize an augmented reality gifting experience that delivers their gift card with exhilaration
- Founder: Hunaid Nulwala
- Sector: CleanTech and material science
- Objective: developing a sustainable, high performance protective coating technology to combat corrosion problems and accelerate industrial decarbonization
- Founders: Alec Baum and Adam Castelbaum
- Sector: FinTech
- Objective: makers of an app designed to increase the transparency and accessibility of the options trading space, one trader at a time
- Founders: Darren Mok and Charles Wang
- Sector: AR/VR, blockchain, fashion, Web3 and direct-to-consumer
- Objective: aims to create an ecosystem that allows users to outfit, interact, and evolve garments in real-life and metaverse experiences, blurring the line between the physical and digital worlds by using Web3 and AR technologies
- Founder: Samarth Gowda
- Sector: Blockchain, cryptocurrency, education and Web3
- Objective: building an on-chain resume allowing anyone to build Web3 native recruiting tools
- Founder: Dipan Pal
- Sector: AI and robotics
- Objective: developing a first-of-its-kind re-programmable operating AI-based robotic system that can perform key repetitive tasks without the need to re-program
