Build Sprint Demo Day 🚀
Come & see what CMU entrepreneurs are building
CMU T&E Build Sprint is a community for Carnegie Mellon alumni who love to build.
We started with a founding cohort of 20+ founders who met every week to discuss ongoing challenges and accelerate each others’ journeys. Our founders joined us from across the US as well as India & Singapore, representing top tech talent across multiple industries and strong communities like YC and OnDeck. We strongly believe that supporting these founders is a significant step towards creating a stronger CMU entrepreneurship ecosystem.
Over a period of one month, a group of CMU founders joined us to build, hack, and create. We’re excited to share what they’ve built. Build Sprint Demo Day celebrates CMU entrepreneurs, and is our way of letting the world know that CMU founders are here, and building amazing companies.
About half of our cohort started this journey pre-product. Most of these sprinters took 4 weeks to make a final push towards MVP. Some of them decided to work on the business model and positioning more before committing to further development.
The other half of our cohort started this journey with a product and some customers. Most of these sprinters were focused on growing their customer base. Some of them wanted help with fundraising.
Judges
For each half, we invited a panel of judges to review each pitch.
Michelle Wolf (BME ‘14) is the Co-Founder and CEO of New Wave Foods, a company disrupting the food industry with their plant-based seafood alternative protein. New Wave Foods recently closed their Series A in 2021 and has raised over $20M in funding.
Karthik Suresh (MS) is the Co-Founder of Ignition, a collaborative hub to help teams plan, execute, and measure GTM processes. He was previously a PM at Facebook and the Head of Product at Craft.co.
Jeremy Toeman (BS) is the founder of AugX Labs, an AI video platform helping creators make compelling videos at a fraction of the time & effort. Previously, he led product teams as the VP of Product at companies such as WarnerMedia, Joyn GmbH, Etsy, CBS, and Palmtastik (now WebOS).
Ivan Kirigin (MS ‘05) is currently the Founder and Managing Partner of Tango.VC. Previously, he founded two companies: YesGraph (acq. by Lyft) and Tipjoy (YC W08)
Alex Klarfeld (ECE ‘13) is the Co-Founder of Divvy Homes, a unicorn company that is helping thousands of families transition from renters to homeowners.
At the end of each cohort’s presentations, the judges were asked to vote on Best Idea, Best Product Execution, and Best Pitch. Below are the winners from each cohort.
Winners
Best Idea 💡
Eydle
Eydle is an AI-powered platform for taking down scam profiles on social media. Founder Ashwini Rao created Eydle to be an end-to-end solution that can monitor, detect and take down impersonation accounts for both small and large brands. Eydle’s deep learning-powered platform can identify and take down impersonation accounts before they can harm a brand’s customers.
Jisell
Jisell is an AR-enabled wallet for your gift cards. Co-founders Alex Cusall and Yunfan Jiang created Jisell to help brands connect with customers and reduce costs from unused gift cards by providing a customizable augmented reality experience customers can use as an e-Wallet. Users can purchase gift cards in the app or upload a photo of their physical card, and use the gift cards at checkout at any supporting retailer.
Best Execution✨
Swachh
Swachh is an air pollution solutions company founded by Karan Rao. Rao saw that many people in India struggle with cigarette smoke and pollution, but cannot afford a $200+ filter for their entire home. Rao came up with a biodegradable solution, Rena, which attaches to your home ceiling fan and filters the air at a fraction of the cost of an ordinary air purifier.
Syndee
Syndee is an AI-powered home assistant for millennial mothers founded by Deepthi Uppala, Deepthi created Syndee as an all-in-one platform to help young families to manage their household, with inspiration for household projects, customized plans from AI, a curated eCommerce experience, and collaboration tools, such as supportive parent circles and calendar pairing.
Best Pitch 🎙️
Suresh Manian
Pica helps you find the food you want with intelligence. Founded by Suresh Manian, PICA combines health and food recommendations by allowing users with dietary restrictions to search for their by dish, rather than by restaurant. PICA allow users along with their friends to search. based on ratings, budget, AND dietary preferences, making it easier for groups with diet restrictions to coordinate eating out.
Christian Murphy
“Christian, like the religion. Murphy, like Eddie Murphy”
Eachday is a mobile platform for ADHD self-management founded by Christian Murphy. Built from ground up for an ADHD audience, Eachday provides users with personalized digital therapy that adapts to the user as they transition through their life, including tools to help improve their memory, focus, and impulse control, as well as organizing and prioritizing tasks throughout the week.
Builders
Mogara integrates with your existing sales, CRM and user research systems to seamlessly ingest data from prospect conversations across platforms. It was created by Neha Shah and uses NLP and user research to discover the voice of prospects.
Labr is a tool for navigating professional networks. Founded by Jeff Monson, Labr helps people find the best jobs, customers, and teams by searching along people who have worked with each other before.
Aligned is an NLP-driven assistant for team alignment founded by Himanshu Rasam. It integrates with enterprise collaboration platforms and uses templates to get a holistic view of project alignment and help make group decisions by using NLP to capture and prioritize misalignments.
Copilot is an autonomous bicycle safety system created by Clark Haynes. It uses sensors and machine learning to constantly identify vehicles and sends an alarm when drivers are approaching aggressively or trying to pass.
EIDAR is an an all-in-one smart shopping cart solution created by Naman Gupta. EIDAR's autonomy module mounts on a shopping cart and provides advanced services powered by robotic tools, such as on-cart checkout, in-store navigation, and inventory management.
Brandbass connects small businesses with a commission-driven salesforce that creates on-demand social content to drive revenue. It was founded by Mya Papolu to make life easier for business owners and operators, and uses AI to vet influencers and understand how they engage with their audiences.
ChapterMe is a AI-powered video indexing platform founded by Annamalai (AK) Kathirkamanathan. ChapterMe auto-creates timestamped chapters for your videos and podcasts to help reach more users at scale without spending hours on manually indexing.
Axomem is a SaaS-based digital twin & 3D data visualization platform founded by Sean W. It insight into complex systems and makes real world environments computable for AI algorithms, so decision makers can understand what is happening and react faster.
YarpBot is a livestream chat assistant created by Zac Lovoy that uses Natural Language Processing to understand the true intent behind a query in chat and deliver a customized answer. It allows users to customize responses using text, emotes, and other variables.
Halo is a viral social commerce platform for direct-to-consumer brands founded by Anna Fuller. Halo shopping parties last for a limited time and allow customers to drive down the price by inviting as many people as possible before time is up.
Assembo is an AI-powered note-taking application founded by Lan Li. Assembo helps teams to prepare, engage, and get more out of meetings in less time. It connects directly to popular video meeting platforms without disrupting the flow of the meeting.
Cyclic Software is a server-less full-stack deployment and hosting platform founded by serial entrepreneur and software engineer, Kam Lasater. It provides an execution environment that is optimized for speed and allows designers to go from proof of concept to global load without re-architecting the application.
Covalent is a curated internal matching services for enterprise teams founded by Abhishek Bharvaga. It intelligently introduces people on Slack, Email, and other services based on background, experience, interests and other customized factors, allowing for effortless introductions without losing the personal touch.
About CMU T&E
CMU Tech & Entrepreneurship is for Carnegie Mellon alumni who are passionate about building an entrepreneurial ecosystem. We frequently host events and we've recently started a startup school for people interested in founding their own company. For more information, follow us here.
Check out Doug’s behind-the-scenes deep dive to learn how Build Sprint came together: First Cohort Retrospective