10 student products involved with the Launchpad@Stevens program have been selected to receive a Thomas H. Scholl Award, Stevens has announced. The chosen projects have earned funds that can be used to help lift the ventures off the ground.
Launchpad@Stevens is an entrepreneurship incubator founded and directed by Stevens professor Dr. Mukund Iyengar. After pitching a problem they would like to solve, Stevens students work to create a viable business in 12 months with the guidance of Dr. Iyengar and other community entrepreneurs.
The Thomas H. Scholl Awards are granted every year to the 10 ventures judged to have the most potential. Attached to the awards is funding that is intended to cover the projects’ initial costs. At the end of the semester, projects that have made the most progress towards their goals will receive a second, larger funding award. Thomas Scholl, after whom the award is named, is a high-tech entrepreneur who joined the Stevens Board of Trustees and created the Thomas H. Scholl Lectures by Visiting Entrepreneurs series.
This is the second year since the establishment of the Scholl Awards. One of last year’s winners is Quae, a community voting app that has since been used by multiple Stevens organizations, including the Student Government Association and The Stute. A poll on Quae helped push the S. C. Williams Library to make the decision to extend its hours late in 2021.
Launchpad projects tend to belong to a diverse array of disciplines, including healthcare, music, education, and quality of life. This year, the winners were selected from a pool consisting of more than 90 ideas that were pitched to the incubator.
The full list of winning ventures is:
- A51, a virtual reality photo platform founded by Benjamin Hayden.
- DiAlerts, a personal assistant to help manage diabetes founded by Arianna Gehan.
- Tir-One, a personalized virtual learning environment founded by Anthony Mauceri, Harris Spahic, and Devlin Stein.
- Bucket, a history-discussion portal founded by Gianangelo Dichio.
- Dynato, which produces prosthetics with sensors founded by Angel Clavijo.
- Ghyubepd, a job application and interview assistance tool.
- Intrium, a copyright infringement-avoidance tool for musicians.
- Jolk, a “platform that incentivizes civil discourse on sensitive topics.”
- Podsee, an interactive podcast service founded by Burak Yesil.
- Vvoy, a project which aims to help those who feel isolated by encouraging them to explore local environments founded by Ursala Oddo-White and Carly Walker.
The Stute learned more about the first three of these projects from their founders. Launchpad emphasizes the need to identify “pain points,” or personal problems that an entrepreneur wishes to solve, as the first step to building a successful product. It is a strategy that is reflected in each of these teams and their burgeoning business ideas.
Ben Hayden and his business partner Bronson Shepherd created A51 after Hayden, a photographer, noticed that existing photo storage infrastructure did not prioritize the photo-viewing experience. “Ultimately, people take photos because they want to capture an experience they’re having. But then it gets reduced to a three-second vision on Instagram,” he explained.
In contrast to social media, A51 is intended to lengthen and deepen the experience of viewing photos, whether they be your own or someone else’s, by simulating a studio space that you might find in a museum. Eventually, Hayden said, A51 will even allow photographers to turn their virtual galleries into marketplaces, allowing viewers to purchase photos right on the platform.
A prototype demo of A51 and a survey for potential customers of the platform are available at a51.studio. (Note: the demo is not compatible with mobile devices.) Hayden said that his and Shepherd’s immediate plan is to rebuild the platform in the Unity engine and work towards implementing photo upload functionality.
Arianna Gehan described her project, called DiAlerts, as a “personal assistant to help manage diabetes.” Inspired by her own experience as a college student living with Type 1 Diabetes, Gehan created DiAlerts to tackle the mental health challenges that come with juggling a busy schedule and the monitoring of blood sugar.
“The goal of DiAlerts is to make living with diabetes less exhausting and less stressful,” she said. “The main portion of the app is a calendar that allows users to input their plans, and based on the events logged, they will receive personalized recommendations to help them prepare for their day in terms of managing diabetes. For example, if you have a sports practice at night, you will be reminded to take a snack before you go so your blood sugar does not go dangerously low. Additionally, users will be able to put in other reminders relating to their diabetes, such as reminders to refill prescriptions or take medications.”
Anthony Mauceri, Devlin Stein, and Harris Spahic created Tir-One, a personalized tutoring platform that caters to individual learning styles. “We are inspired to build Tir because we have all suffered from the structured learning environment that school promotes. Each of us has a different learning style and believe that it should be up to the student to choose how they learn,” wrote Mauceri. “That’s what Tir is – the platform that we wish we had.” He said that the group’s current primary goal is to build a minimum viable product (MVP) for use by Stevens students.
The teams also spoke about their experiences working in the Launchpad program with Dr. Iyengar.
Hayden lauded Dr. Iyengar for turning innovation and entrepreneurship into “a science.” He said, “I’ve wanted to start a company for a really long time. I didn’t know what it was going to be, or how to do it, but Mukund and Launchpad have pretty much made that process go from total abstract to something actually obtainable and kind of turn it into a process that can be achievable.” Hayden described Launchpad’s individual guidance and its use of checkpoints and milestones as particularly valuable assets.
“Launchpad@Stevens has really challenged me to see how I want to make a difference in the world,” said Gehan. “It has been great to connect with other motivated and passionate peers in the program, and the mentors are incredibly helpful as their experiences are invaluable. Professor Mukund has inspired us to really look into our lives and think about what we want to improve.”
Mauceri described the Launchpad courses as “intense.” “We attend retreats, give pitches, form companies, make connections with industry professionals… the list goes on,” he explained. “To top things off, the community is the best part. To be surrounded by so many people committed to making a difference, and actually taking steps toward that goal. It’s very inspiring.”
Ultimately, even with the experience and guidance of Dr. Iyengar and Launchpad, it is the talent and hard work of the entrepreneurs that make successful creations possible. “Launchpad is what you make of it,” said Mauceri, “The more you put in, the more you get out.”
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