In the News

Alumni, Faculty, Press Release, Students

Meet This Year’s Big Idea Competition Finalists

Ten teams have made it to the final event in our university business idea pitch competition open to alumni, current students, and faculty researchers. They will compete for $170,000 in cash and scholarship prizes. The competition is hosted by the Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, an interdisciplinary division of the Naveen Jindal School of Management.

Student Track

Manta Systems – Tamara Marshall, MBA’24 / JSOM

Manta Systems is designing the first automated, app-enabled, frozen fish food feeder on the market.

Routora – Tom Vazhekatt, BS’24 Computer Science / ECS

Routora is a route planning solution that creates faster and more efficient multi-stop routes by optimally reordering a list of addresses to save you time and money on the road.

BuildQuota – Xavier Madison, MBA’23 / JSOM

BuildQuota is an AI-driven Construction Supplier Diversity Management software focused on simplifying the diversity compliance workflow for all stakeholders on projects, increasing job site productivity and minimizing risk of non-compliance.

Olive Tree Therapeutics – Madison Valdivia, BS’23 Biology / BBS

The Coupage Vest is a high-frequency, vibrating vest that is strapped firmly around the thoracic cavity of a patient to break up thick mucus in the lungs as a therapeutic modality for various upper respiratory illnesses.

Alumni Track 

Catenate Corp – Sameer Ranjan, MS’20 Business Analytics / JSOM

Catenate’s AI-driven platform aids decision-making at every important node of human life. Our products built over this platform can assist school students in choosing the right career, professionals track and improve their soft skills, people manage their well-being and individuals make wealth based on their risk profile. 

EKUSO – Karlin Oei, BS’20 Finance / JSOM

Using the innovative EKUSO method, we merge education, gaming, and social-emotional learning to create innovative environments for those who feel left out. Our e-learning provider provides fully customized youth esports training programs for middle and high schools.

Creator Camp – Jacky Chao, BA’22 Animation / AHT

Creator Camp is an education technology company that is on a mission to empower children with hands-on creative-tech skills, while also making sure they have a lot of fun. 

Technology Commercialization Track

OptiMIND – Chandramallika Basak – Associate Professor, Center for Vital Longevity / BBS

OptiMIND is a series of brain training games designed to enhance brain and cognition across the lifespan, ensuring that you stay sharp and focused at any age.

Kile Technology – Stefano Leonardi – Professor,  Mechanical Engineering / ECS

Kile Technology is developing digital twins of wind farms to optimize power production, increase durability and mitigate the risk of investment.

Think! LLC – Joseph Friedman, Associate Professor, NeuroSpinCompute Laboratory  / ECS

Artificial intelligence processing units (AIPUs) that learn efficiently and autonomously.

Event Details – 2023 Big Idea Competition Finals

April 26, 2023 / 3:20 PM / Davidson-Gundy Alumni Center / Reserve your seat

Special Guest Speaker – Gen Fukunaga

Gen Fukunaga is an entrepreneur and investor. He recently retired as CEO of Funimation Entertainment which he had founded in 1994, sold in 2005 to a public company, purchased back in 2011 and sold to Sony Pictures in October 2017. Funimation/Crunchyroll is the dominant distributor of Anime (Japanese animation) outside of Asia including over 1,000 brands such as Dragon Ball Z, Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Cowboy BeBop and My Hero Academia.

Mr. Fukunaga is currently a partner in two venture capital companies and two commercial real estate private equity firms. He is also a Board member, and/or advisor in various start-ups.

Students

New Internship Program Stresses Innovation

Large corporations are increasingly looking to the principles of lean startups to help develop new business ideas and spur innovation. Such is the case with IgniteConnex Inc., a subsidiary of technology consulting company CG Infinity set up to incubate new companies.

CG Infinity has now partnered with several faculty at the Naveen Jindal School of Management and the Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship to create a new, year-long internship program called the Infinite Corporate Incubator Program.

The idea grew out of a conversation between Rajiv Shah, Founder & Program Director for the Systems Engineering and Management (SEM) program at UT Dallas, and Professor of Practice, and Bhopi Dhall, founder and CEO of CG Infinity. The two first met while working at Texas Instruments years ago, and Dhall wanted to give back while also fostering innovation.

Through further conversations with Saurajit Kanungo, president and COO of CG Infinity, and Rob Palacios, Chief Innovation Officer/EVP at CG Infinity and President/Co-Founder at IgniteConnex, Inc., they arrived at the idea of an internship, but one where the university would help vet applications instead of the company fielding applications.

“They wanted to have UTD Master’s level students who can help them to understand what the customer requirements are, understand the internal capabilities, and then take all that into launching new initiatives,” Shah says.

CG Infinity wanted to hire a small cohort of interns with complementary skillsets to work as a team and help incubate new startup ideas. During the fall of 2022, Shah looped in Paul Nichols, Assistant Professor of Practice, and Emily Choi, Associate Professor of Instruction and Academic Director, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, to help conceptualize this internship program.

“In the past, when they went out and created solutions for their clients, they realized, ‘wow, this solution could actually be useful for more than just this one client, we should build a business around it and launch it,’” Choi says. “But going from the product or idea to launching into a business and scaling it, that’s a whole different process. That’s what we teach in the innovation entrepreneurship program.”

Working with Fiona Hunter in UTD’s Career Management Center and Angela Howard from the graduate advising team, Shah, Nichols, and Choi formalized the program and opened applications on an accelerated timeline compared to most other internship processes. “One weekend, all three of us burned the midnight oil and we narrowed it down [from over 90] to 15 or 20 applicants,” Shah says. They looked for students who had real-world experience and the ability to work as a team. Shah, Nichols, and Choi interviewed those 15-20 applicants and shared their short list with CG Infinity, who then interviewed finalists.

Ultimately, three Master of Science students in Business Analytics were chosen: Madhurima Madgula, Nekitha Ramachandran, and Pakshal Shah. They started in January and will continue through the rest of the calendar year. “Our plan now is to mentor and advise this group of students and make sure they have the right tools and concepts to support CGI initiatives,” Choi says.

The hope is that this partnership will continue indefinitely, and the cohort will grow in future years. Since many students studying entrepreneurship will nevertheless find jobs at large corporations, Nichols says this internship program will help fill a need in bringing entrepreneurial thinking to big companies. “We’ve started talking about, how do we emphasize more the corporate innovation side of things?” he asks. “This gives us a really good example of how you can bring that entrepreneurial mindset into a significantly sized organization.”

Alumni

Alum Launches AI-Powered Legal Tech Company

When Zain Kalson BS’22 and his dad initially set out to solve the problem of high-conflict divorces—situations where one party drives the conflict—their original vision was a support group. Kalson says these divorces make up roughly 15 percent of all divorces. “It seemed to be a space where there’s a lot of people that are going through some of the toughest moments of their life, and generally there’s just not a lot of support for them,” he adds.  

Through their first iteration, Kalson says he and his dad “were having hundreds of people tell us how challenging it was to separate fact from fiction in their divorces.” The partner who is the source of conflict in a high-conflict divorce might spread misinformation, hide assets, or undervalue their business to minimize alimony or child support payments.

In January 2022, the father-son team pivoted to another idea: using artificial intelligence to uncover hidden assets that might otherwise take countless billable hours to find. Kalson is now CEO and his father is CTO of Etheia (named for Alethiea, the Greek goddess of truth). The company sells its tech-enabled service to family law firms so that the firm has the information they need to negotiate a better settlement for their clients.

After extracting financial data from the disclosures provided by the other party’s lawyer (credit cards, bank statements, and so on), Etheia can uncover things like an out-of-state utility bill tied to an undisclosed real estate property or safe box deposit containing gold. It also visualizes financial data and creates reports that family lawyers can use in court.

Law firms have long-established processes, so developing the market and encouraging innovation was Kalson’s biggest challenge. “We just worked through that through a lot of deep customer discovery,” he says. “It was dozens, if not hundreds, of calls with family attorneys trying to understand what are their pain points? What are the challenges they’re experiencing? And what are some avenues where we might be able to support them better?”

While earning his Bachelor of Science in Information Technology and Systems at UTD, Kalson participated in the Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurships’ venture coaching opportunities, took the Startup Launch class, and matched with an industry expert through the Venture Mentoring Service of North Texas. “The biggest insight for me was to stay lean,” Kalson says. “I realized we didn’t need to raise capital, hire a team, or seek out investors. Staying lean meant focusing first on building a product that solves the challenges of our target market.” He also worked with the alumni office to make connections in the legal tech space.

That hard work seems to be paying off. Etheia was named a semifinalist for the American Bar Association’s Techshow in 2023 and was featured in Family Lawyer Magazine. They also participated in an event with the Dallas Bar Association Family Law Bench Bar and had several law firms sign up for trials.

Institute News, Students

Meet Our New Assistant Director: Leon Jacobson

We are very excited to add Leon Jacobson to our team! Though he may seem new, Leon is a very familiar face among members of our staff. In 2022 Leon earned his MBA with a concentration in both entrepreneurship and marketing from UT Dallas while working on his own startup company.

We asked Leon a few questions to get acquainted:

Tell us a little about you.

Over the last ten years, I have launched Direct-to-Consumer startups in E-Commerce, Advertising, Medical Transportation, and Health Tech, bringing products and services to market with the goal of making a positive impact in people’s lives. Most recently, while I was earning my degree, I was selected as a winner of the Texas Business Hall of Fame “Future Business Legend” award.

While working on my MBA, I was selected as a Venture Fellow at Revtech Ventures, a venture capital firm focused on retail technology, where I created an accelerator program.

I also enjoy guest lecturing for MBA classes on entrepreneurship and venture capital. I am born and raised in Dallas and am married to the most amazing person I know.

What would you like to achieve in your new role?

I really believe my role is to help cultivate the next generation of great entrepreneurs and innovators. If I can help nurture an innovative and cohesive environment within UT Dallas that creates successful startup ventures, that would be incredibly rewarding.  Additionally, being able to be a mentor and positive influence for those looking to build their own businesses would tremendously impactful.

What program or event are you looking forward to most?

As someone who grew up watching Shark Tank, I am obviously excited to help organize and run the Big Idea Competition. This is a uniquely special opportunity for those individuals who are looking to create an innovative venture. I wish I had this type of competition when I was in college. Furthermore, helping students learn about venture capital, fundraising, and all the necessary steps to building a successful startup through our accelerator programs and other events is something I am very excited about.

What’s your mentorship specialty?

Given my entrepreneurial experience as well as having worn the venture capital hat, I believe it allows me to relate to students, wherever they may be across their entrepreneurial journey. I started my first company at 25, but I also grew up watching my dad work extremely hard to be a successful entrepreneur in the retail space here in Dallas. I have seen every facet of the entrepreneurial journey, including the mistakes one makes along the way. I think this lends itself to being a great mentor. I like to be honest, but empathetic and encouraging.

Students

First Student-Run Accelerator Launches to Advance Early-Stage Ideas

UTD entrepreneurs, Rahul Madhugiri BS’23 and Sofia Babool BS’22 understand what it takes to launch a venture while still in college. But as natural problem solvers, there was something missing about their collegiate entrepreneurship experience. “We have a lot of startup resources on campus that are staff and faculty-led, but none seem to be student-led,” said Madhugiri. It isn’t uncommon to have college students run startup accelerators or pitch competitions. In fact, a study published in 2021 in the Journal of International Entrepreneurship suggests, “student-led entrepreneurial organizations (SLEOs) allow students to attend entrepreneurship events and workshops, to network, to work in multidisciplinary and international teams and to share ideas. All these activities promote an entrepreneurial environment and culture that is deemed to foster entrepreneurship.”

The concept, according to Madhugiri and Babool, is simple, “we’re going to utilize knowledgeable and seasoned entrepreneurs who have participated in and experienced first-hand the trials and processes of launching a venture. It’s like a pay-it-forward model for the next batch of upcoming Comet entrepreneurs,” stated Babool.

The incubator’s curriculum uses Guy Kawasaki’s “The Only 10 Slides You Need in Your Pitch.” The presentation format, developed by Guy Kawasaki, a venture capitalist and startup advisor, is designed to be used in pitch presentations for startups, and it focuses on the key information that investors need to know in order to make a decision about investing in a company. The format includes 10 slides that cover topics like problem/solution, financial projections, traction, and business model. Once the cohort of five students was selected, the team conducted a post-acceptance survey and curated a custom curriculum based on the specific needs of the cohort.

Friday, January 20th was the official kickoff meeting and over the next 10 weeks, the cohort will meet at the university’s Blackstone LaunchPad co-working space and the Richardson IQ where UTD has a significant presence to train and prepare for a culminating demo day.

Perks of the program include:

  • Customized curriculum for young founders
  • Skill-building workshops from startup experts and venture capitalists
  • Coaching and feedback from experienced UTD founders

The following teams have been selected for the first cohort:

Allercheck is working to solve how people suffering from food allergies can eat pain-free by detecting allergens before they enter the system.  

Tori Sonkin (BS ’25)

Nerveli is utilizing neuroscience fundamentals on pain to design a mobile application that allows users to take diagnostic testing that will produce daily tailored pain management recommendations.

Leon Jacobson (MBA ’22)

Homelessness in Dallas is a nonprofit art program designed to help improve mental health and increase a sense of dignity among homeless artists, helping break the cycle of homelessness.

Gia Kirk (BS ’23)

No-Time-2-Cook is a meal prep program tailored to students.

Ofer Turjeman (BS ’23)

Fits is a website-based 3D modeling tool that allows for a quicker and easier clothes shopping experience.  

Zuhair Lakhani, (BS ’26)