This is the first installment in a three-part series about student startups that launched on College Hill.
The day before one of his final exams last spring, Sai Mandhan — a former member of The Herald’s Tech Team — pulled an all-nighter with Vishnu Sreenivasan in his dorm. Instead of studying, they stayed up brainstorming start-up ideas and throwing together a last-minute application for the Y Combinator summer accelerator, a three-month program with around a 1% acceptance rate which provides mentorship and funding for startups.
Following an initial rejection, the pair was accepted into the fall cohort and found themselves in San Francisco with $500,000 in funding. Now, they are taking a semester off from Brown to build their artificial intelligence startup.
Alongside Mandhan and Sreenivasan, Erik Vank and Aryan Sawhney — who are also taking the semester off — rounded out the Brown students who earned a highly coveted spot in Y Combinator’s Fall 2025 batch.
The four students’ acceptance into one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent launchpads for early-stage ventures reflects a growing interest in entrepreneurship on Brown’s campus.
In the last year, the number of students enrolled in entrepreneurship courses at Brown increased by over 20%, with more than 1,664 students claiming a seat in one of Brown’s many entrepreneurship courses, according to Katie Calabro, program coordinator for the Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship.
Many more students also engage in co-curricular activities related to entrepreneurship — including several that have launched for the first time in the last year, ranging from venture prize competitions to conferences.
Student startup founders identified the Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship — which was founded in 2016 — as a driver in Brown’s growing startup landscape.
“Our vision is to have an impact in the lives of as many students as we possibly can when they are students, and then set them up well for a 21st-century career where they can deploy the entrepreneurial process as a liberal art,” said Executive Director of the Nelson Center and Professor of the Practice of Engineering Danny Warshay ’87 P’20 P’23.5.
What makes Warshay “most proud” is the inclusive, interdisciplinary nature of entrepreneurship at Brown. According to Warshay, the 53 students who completed the entrepreneurship certificate last year represented 28 different concentrations.
“That, to me, is different. That is distinctive. That is world-class,” he said.
Sometimes, early-stage ideas are sparked in the classroom. Spanning several different departments and open to all concentrators, Brown’s entrepreneurship courses look to teach both theoretical and experiential components of launching a venture, Warshay said.
Warshay pointed to the over 100 students enrolled in ENGN 1931T: “Entrepreneurship Practicum: Starting, Running and Scaling Ventures,” which is especially “designed to help entrepreneurs turn ideas into real ventures,” according to its listing on Courses@Brown.
Other students opt to explore entrepreneurship through co-curricular activities hosted by the Nelson Center or student organizations, including the Van Wickle Ventures, Brown Innovation for Health, Young Entrepreneurs of Providence, Emergent and Brown Entrepreneurship Program, commonly known as Brown EP.
The Innovation Dojo — hosted under Brown EP — is a student-led, semester-long start-up incubator workshop that selects around 20 students to participate each semester. The workshops are led by peers and emphasize bottom-up research. The semester culminates in a final pitch competition.
Innovation Dojo attracts a diverse range of students, from experienced founders to those “who come in and learn a bit about the process, thinking they might be entrepreneurial in the future,” said Innovation Dojo Director Seth Abeles ’27.
For Debra Cheng ’28, a member of the Innovation Dojo fall 2025 cohort, the start-up incubator presented an opportunity to learn how she could transform “surges of inspiration for inventions, start-ups, games” into real ventures.
“With no connection to any type of entrepreneurship, turning these ideas into reality seemed virtually impossible,” Cheng said. But less than a month into her participation with Innovation Dojo, Cheng has “already met a plethora of talented founders who have expanded my perspective on what it means to enter entrepreneurship.”
Founded in 1998, Brown EP is a student-run program under the Nelson Center that offers accessible opportunities for students to engage with entrepreneurship at Brown, regardless of their experience or time commitment, according to the Brown EP website and President of Brown EP Hunter Tsao ’26.
“On a big scale, EP really tries to be the central hub for entrepreneurship for student founders on campus,” said Tsao, hoping to “inspire, grow and develop entrepreneurship from every facet,” he added.
Brown EP hosts a wide range of events — from educational workshops to one-on-one “date” nights with venture capitalists — to engage students at every stage of their entrepreneurial journey, explained Tsao. Last year, the organization also organized a multi-day, all-expenses-paid trip to San Francisco to allow select students to meet with top startups and investors.
To strengthen entrepreneurship on campus, Samantha Shulman ’25 founded Emergent at Brown, which aims to build a startup culture similar to that of West Coast schools like Stanford, according to Co-President Sami Nouji ’26.
Over 300 students attended the inaugural Emergent AI Venture Conference last year, which featured around 20 guest speakers and a $10,000 pitch competition, according to Nourji.
Noticing a trend towards pre-professional careers such as consulting and software engineering at Brown, Nourji hopes Emergent will “inspire people and connect them with co-founders” while also encourage students to “take that leap of faith when it comes to exploring careers that are not as safe, but where the upside in terms of personal fulfillment is much, much, much higher,” he said.
