8/26/2024 Bruce Adams
Illinois CS students anchored three startup tech companies that walked away with awards at the Cozad New Venture Challenge 2024 Finals Event in Chicago this past April.
Written by Bruce Adams
CS students are building award-winning tech startups almost from the minute they step on campus. The Siebel School of Computing and Data Science is the place to be if you want to be involved in starting a tech company. An extensive, well-resourced, and vigorous advisory and support structure exists at the Illinois Grainger College of Engineering to help students with an idea to collaborate, build, test, and put their ideas into action as enterprises.
Three teams anchored by CS students walked away with awards at the Cozad New Venture Challenge 2024 Finals Event at Portal Innovations in Chicago on April 17. Pathlit, with CS undergraduates Mark Zhang and Emma Chen, won the Grand Prize and $50,000 in investment; ClimeCast, led by CS + Linguistics undergraduate Raj Amalakanti, won the third-place award of $25,000, and Provenance Security, led by CS graduate student Akul Goyal, won a $10,000 Finalist Prize. Pathlit helps enterprises and individuals quickly build their own GenAI-powered use cases, saving them the time and expense of building in-house GenAI teams.
Pathlit CTO Mark Zhang says, “I learned a lot from some of the courses that we had,” pointing to CS 425 distributed systems, advanced distributed systems, and CS 423 operating systems classes. “Those courses helped me understand how to build scalable software and think about the properties of software. And that helps us get up to speed after building the prototype and the actual product.”
Akul Goyal founded Cozad finalist Provenance Security while a Secure & Transparent Systems Laboratory team member headed by CS professor Adam Bates. The startup is developing a next-generation endpoint detection and response tool tailored for small and medium businesses. “Our breakthrough moment came,” he says, “when the system we created outperformed existing market solutions and demonstrated the ability to scale to thousands of machines. Before that, much of the research in our area had yet to make the leap from academic exploration to commercial viability. After we received those results, Adam and I decided it was time to build a business around our idea.” Goyal adds that “Professor Gang Wang was instrumental in helping us refine our ideas and develop a concept that made sense to everyone. His guidance was invaluable in bridging the gap between academic theory and practical application.”
Jacob Ahmad Shalabi from the Pathlit team points to the entrepreneurial support structure, mentioning, "We've explored a bunch of entrepreneurial resources that are offered. We are very grateful to be surrounded by such a strong entrepreneurship community at the U of I. Besides Cozad, we also took part in the iVenture Accelerator, which we were at for most of the summer, and it was a great experience. Meeting a bunch of different startups at the U of I, seeing what they had to offer, and then growing alongside them was a very fun experience for us. The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has great resources for student entrepreneurs like us, and we're very grateful to be building here.”
Kenny Zho, spending the summer in Massachusetts, remarks, "We used CIF (the Campus Instructional Facility) and Grainger Library a whole bunch during the year. Having places to work was helpful. And you don't notice it until it's gone.”
Goyal says, “I encourage anyone interested in entrepreneurship, whether you're an undergraduate or graduate student, to take one or two courses in Technology Entrepreneurship. These courses offer valuable learning opportunities and the chance to meet other like-minded students on campus. Don't hesitate to put yourself out there—you might be surprised by how many U of I students work on unique projects.” He credits Marissa Siero at the Grainger College of Engineering Technology Entrepreneur Center with being “instrumental in the early stages of our journey.”
What about going to college while building a business? Emma Chen notes that “Advay Gupta, our CEO, has a lot of high expectations for us and the work we put in. So, balancing that with schoolwork was a bit of a challenge, I will admit. But honestly, the two feed into each other well. The courses I'm taking and the second learning at school are helping me out and then putting those into practice at Pathlit and in my work and seeing how I can take these skills I'm learning and put them into something useful that's changing the world. That makes it just feel like it's not two separate things that I struggle to balance. It is something that feeds into itself.”
For graduate student Goyal, “Creating a startup takes work, especially as a PhD student, where you must manage doctoral research alongside entrepreneurial efforts. Fortunately, much of the groundwork for my PhD overlaps with my startup, allowing for a smoother transition between the different aspects of my life. However, it is crucial to establish boundaries, as academic and entrepreneurial demands can sometimes conflict with each other.”
He adds that Provenance Security is “looking for students we can work well with. Currently, we are seeking students interested in machine learning, distributed systems, design, and creating a functional product. Much of our work requires students willing to wear multiple hats and transition between different parts of the business. More importantly, we are looking for curious students who thrive working in a fast-paced environment. If this describes you, please reach out to me!”