It’s clearer than ever: The kids are alright.
Young people across the Ocean State are contributing to our ever-growing startup economy in new and exciting ways. One has helped create an underwater robot that gleans information about deep-sea climates and food chains. Another is rescuing medical supplies from landfills, donating them to communities in need instead. Still another is creating a digital community around afro-textured hair.
From the halls of North Smithfield High School to the University of Rhode Island (URI) and everywhere in between, innovation is everywhere. These young entrepreneurs give us insight into what tomorrow will look like for Rhode Island.
Meet the 2020 Rhode Island Inno Under 25.
Chuck Isgar (22) – co-founder and CEO of Intern From Home, co-president of Brown University Entrepreneurship Program
This spring, as colleges and companies alike were reeling from the sudden fallout of the coronavirus pandemic, Chuck Isgar saw opportunity. Along with his fellow Brown University students Megan Kasselberg and David Lu, Isgar launched Intern From Home, a job board for startups to post remote internship opportunities for students, distributed through a website and newsletter.
By the end of the summer, Intern From Home’s newsletter had gained more than 1,000 subscribers from more than 300 different college campuses, prompting us to name Intern From Home one of Rhode Island Inno’s Crisis Innovators.
This isn’t Isgar’s first rodeo in the startup world. The 22-year-old serves as the co-president of the Brown Entrepreneurship Program. He also previously founded the edtech startup BrainChain.
Pierre Lipton (23) – co-founder and COO of 1440 Media
Pierre Lipton, one of the founders of daily newsletter 1440 Media, “felt stuck in a broken media landscape.” So like any good entrepreneur, he set out to fix it. 1440 today sends out a daily email with news on sports, tech, culture, business and more, all without partisan bias or misinformation, Lipton said.
1440 Media has grown month-over-month for the last 19 consecutive months, in spite of the pandemic, Lipton said. The startup partners with advertisers including Quicken Loans, The Motley Fool, Casper and Warby Parker.
Vanessa Kamara (22) – undergraduate research assistant at URI Wearable Biosensing Lab
URI student Vanessa Kamara is a bit of a Renaissance Woman. She’s developed insoles used for monitoring the gait of patients with Parkinson’s disease as part of URI’s Wearable Biosensing Lab. She’s responsible for the hardware prototyping, temperature sensing and respiration simulator development of a “smart mask” called RespDetect that can detect Covid-19 symptoms. And now a senior, she’s just getting started: Kamara is currently looking into Ph.D. programs.
“I’m a curious person,” Kamara told URI Magazine last year, perhaps by way of explanation. “I have lots of questions.”
Kamara is majoring in biomedical engineering and German as part of URI’s German International Engineering Program. She spent much of the last academic year at the Technische Universität Darmstadt, working at the Machine Learning and Data Analytics Lab at Friedrich-Alexander Universität.
Thomas Bonneau (20) – founder and president of America’s Recoverable Medical Supply
Thomas Bonneau is a lifelong humanitarian but a relatively new founder. He has volunteered as an EMT, medical assistant and scribe, and he’s been serving in the Rhode Island National Guard as a medic since 2017.
This summer, with the help of a URI-funded research grant, Bonneau dived headfirst into entrepreneurship, founding a nonprofit called America’s Recoverable Medical Supply. The mission: to recycle medical supplies from the health care industry and donate them to underserved populations, keeping them out of the landfills where they’d ordinarily end up. Bonneau and his team have created a partnership with Partners for World Health, and they have accepted more than 500 pounds of donated medical supplies from the Rhode Island National Guard.
Annabel Strauss (22) – co-founder and director of Envision
At just 22 years old and recently graduated from Brown University, Annabel Strauss set out to make things more equitable for young founders from underrepresented backgrounds.
Over the course of a whirlwind month this summer, Strauss and a group of college students from around the U.S. put together Envision, a brand-new accelerator that provides both capital and curriculum to student startups, prioritizing those led by women and people of color. Envision just closed applications for its second cohort, which will begin in October.
"Socio-economic, racial, college major—every axis of diversity is really important," Strauss said of Envision earlier this month. "We are constantly taking that into account."
Strauss managed to juggle Envision’s launch along with her roles as a venture fellow at General Catalyst’s Rough Draft Ventures, co-founder of a startup called Anchor and a full-time job as a rotational product manager at Facebook, where she works now.
Jackson Sugar (24) – research assistant at URI Graduate School of Oceanography
Ocean engineering master’s student Jackson Sugar has minions doing his bidding.
Well, sort of. He and a team from URI, along with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, MIT, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and the Universities Space Research Association built an underwater robotic device called MINION. The instrument follows marine snow (organic material falling from the ocean’s upper layers) and the base of the food web using cameras, seawater sensors, acoustic recorders and ballast weight. The robot collects data on particle types, accumulation rate and underwater sound sources in the deep sea; once it completes its mission, it floats to the surface to transmit that data via satellite, and the robot can be retrieved and reused.
This is Sugar’s second stint at URI. He earned his bachelor of science there in ocean engineering. During his time as an undergrad, Sugar also headed up the URI Hydrobotics club as chief technology officer, then CEO, leading the team through national competitions.
Kate and Kristianna Lapierre (18) – co-founders of Twin Skin
It’s never too early to follow your dreams. When twin sisters Kate and Kristianna Lapierre were still students at North Smithfield High School, they co-founded Twin Skin, an eco-conscious skincare startup that makes lip balm, lip scrubs and lip tints from all-natural ingredients and sells them in biodegradable tubes.
The Lapierre sisters launched the company during their sophomore year after Kate took an entrepreneurship course. Three years later, Twin Skin has found traction at brick-and-mortar stores in New England, as well as via its e-commerce site, which launched earlier this year. Twin Skin entered the Lt. Governor’s Entrepreneurship Challenge in 2018 and 2019 and won a $2,500 the latter year.
Both twins entered college in Massachusetts this year: Kate is a freshman at Babson College, and Kristianna is a freshman at Brandeis University. They continue to update their website regularly and anticipate a restock around Thanksgiving with new holiday products and scents.
David Lu (22) – co-founder of H2OK Innovations, co-founder and CTO of Intern From Home
Some of the best innovations address the most basic needs. H2OK Innovations, a startup co-founded by Harvard student Annie Lu and Brown student David Lu, uses artificial intelligence and Internet of Things (IoT) technology to ensure access to clean drinking water.
H2OK Innovations' list of accolades is long: It was a finalist in the Harvard President's Innovation Challenge, a finalist in the Brown Venture Prize competition and the winner of the Rhode Island Business Competition in 2019. The startup most recently participated in Harvard i-lab's first virtual Summer Venture Program.
Now, H2OK Innovations is participating virtually in the Techstars Farm to Fork accelerator, where for the next 11 weeks, Lu and his team will work with channel partners Cargill and Ecolab. The startup has already deployed the third iteration of its tech in the field with the U.S. Geological Survey.
Lu also co-founded Intern From Home with Chuck Isgar, his classmate at Brown, which has continued its remote internship matchmaking program into the fall.
Emma Butler (22) – founder of Intimately
When Emma Butler’s mother was diagnosed with fibromyalgia nearly a decade ago, Butler realized just how difficult it became for her mother to find proper clothing. Her mother needed clothing that functioned differently, from undergarments to outwear. But in her opinion, the clothing designed for people like her was medicinal and ugly.
Butler took the challenge into her own hands. She launched her own online retail store, Intimately, that curates and sells undergarments and lingerie that are both functional and beautiful for women with all sorts of disabilities. Intimately sells underwear from the brands Dear Kates, SlickChicks, Elba London and Wings Intimates, with more to come, Butler said.
“In November we will be launching our own line of bras and underwear called Aurore; we hope to bring even more accessible clothing that is even more fashionable,” Butler said in an email to Rhode Island Inno.
Justin Kim (20) and Michael Lai (21) – co-founders of Cress Health
When Justin Kim and Michael Lai launched Cress Health during their sophomore year at Brown, they built an app that allowed anyone struggling with mental health issues to create their own digital, personalized support groups. This spring, in direct response to the psychological toll the pandemic has taken on health care workers, Kim and Lai transitioned Cress Health into an app designed with those workers in mind.
Kim describes Cress Health’s Callie app, slated for public release in October, as an “AI-driven personal wellness companion.” Tools in the app include a wellness journal, mental health reminders from a chatbot and personalized reports about the user’s mental wellbeing over time.
In April, Cress Health received a grant from the Clinton Foundation’s Covid-19 Student Action Fund to expand its work internationally, starting with Kenya and Liberia. The startup was also a student finalist for Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas Awards this year.
Lauren Brown (20) – founder of Figured
Brown University student Lauren Brown is on a mission to help people find their “haircare groove”—and fast. This summer, as part of the B-Lab accelerator program, Brown launched Figured, a startup that helps people with afro-textured hair find the best hair product lineup and routine for their curl characteristics and lifestyle in 90 days.
After running an initial pilot in August, Brown is now working on incorporating more digital solutions into Figured offerings to make personalized hair advice and style tutorials instantly accessible. One of those solutions: a digital hair quiz, which offers a few points of preliminary hair advice tailored to the user’s lifestyle and hair characteristics.
Ved Narayan (21) – co-managing director of Van Wickle Ventures
Ved Narayan, a Brown senior with a double concentration in applied math and economics, is one of the key reasons that Brown now has resources for students interested in entering the world of venture capital. He is one of the founding members of Van Wickle Ventures, a student-run VC firm that teaches its members the basics of VC and invests in companies affiliated with Brown and the Rhode Island School of Design.
Narayan has headed up Van Wickle Ventures as co-managing director since its founding in late 2018. The team is now in the process of raising its second fund. Narayan has also been working as an investor at Insight Partners, a New York City-based venture capital and private equity firm, since May.
Dana Biechele-Speziale (23) – co-founder of SiliStor
At 23 years old, Dana Biechele-Speziale is Ph.D. student in chemistry and chemical biology at Brown University as well as an entrepreneur. Biechele-Speziale co-founded SiliStor this summer through the B-Lab accelerator with her fellow chemistry Ph.D. student Selahaddin Gumus.
SiliStor is a breast milk storage system with space-saving, reusable silicone bottles, a storage unit that ensures the oldest milk is easily accessible and adapters that enable direct attachment of bottles to a breast pump and feeding nipple. It’s designed to allow for simple pumping, storing and feeding, cutting out the need for milk transfers.
This summer, SiliStor won a $500 grant from Haley Hoffman Smith's Her Big Idea Fund, which is designed to help women entrepreneurs overcome financial barriers. Hoffman Smith will also offer SiliStor a year of mentorship as it gets off the ground.
