This is the second installment in a three-part series about student startups that launched on College Hill.
At Brown, startups are being built in dorm rooms, classes and late-night study sessions. These ideas are generated through co-curricular activities, the Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship and participation in student groups.
But not every idea will make its way into the final pitch deck. The process of honing and refining can be challenging — and expensive.
Ideation to pre-seed funding
For founders looking to fund their startups, the Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship offers various grants and prizes that students may apply for, which top out at $25,000. According to the Nelson Center’s website, some grant opportunities encourage students to “address persistent and significant problems,” such as systemic racism and climate change.
The Nelson Center also provides “multiple layers of mentorship” — from peer and alum entrepreneurs in residence, to a network of over 700 Brown alums, according to Katie Calabro, program coordinator for the center.
Joohyun Cha ’26.5 recently received a grant from the Nelson Center to continue scaling his AI and hardware startup, Dawn. Building off of his long-standing interest in augmented reality and AI technologies, Cha is currently working with his co-founder — a student at Columbia — to source manufacturers and machine shops in their efforts to pilot their AR glasses intended for factory workers.
As an international student from South Korea, Cha chose to attend college in the United States in part due to the country’s dynamic startup ecosystem, venture capital resources and talent, he said.
He was drawn to the U.S.’s “fail-proof culture” around start-ups. “Even if you fail, you can try again and succeed,” Cha said, adding that a more risk-averse culture exists in other countries.
Cha said that, as an Ivy League institution, Brown’s name “gives a lot of recognition” in the startup space, leading to greater visibility and trust in his academic and technical capabilities.
“A lot of big tech companies right now that are leading the world were founded by young college students,” Cha noted.
Beyond its grants, the Nelson Center also provides larger scale venture support through the Community Lab — which offers founders dedicated mentorship and collaboration workspaces mentorship — and an eight-week summer accelerator, Breakthrough Lab, also known as B-Lab.
Through B-Lab, founders like Moise Gasana ’26 and Janya Kaur ’26 have received $4,000 in funding for their projects as well as structured mentorship, according to Calabro.
Gasana met his co-founder Max Tippie ’27 on a bus ride to an intercollegiate NextGen Entrepreneurship Network conference. During the ride, Gasana pitched Tippie his initial idea for UAPPLY, a centralized admissions platform intended to reduce “administrative barriers and broadens access to higher education opportunities” in Africa.
To build the program, Tippie and Gasana first took advantage of grants from the Nelson Center to cover development costs, such as software subscriptions, before looking for additional funding sources. They then turned to investors at B-Lab, the larger Brown alum network and BearTank — a Brown event modeled after the popular television show “Shark Tank.”
Kaur, another participant in this year’s B-Lab, is a co-founder of Melaa: a marketplace that allows idle spaces, such as cafes after hours, to be bookable for gatherings.
Kaur said she first noticed the potential for a product like Melaa when selling samosas in her parents’ small Punjabi restaurants at 12 years old. Kaur remembered her parents’ restaurant being empty for half the day, only opening in the evenings.
“We realized that there’s so much downtime because there’s an asymmetry in demand,” Kaur said.
Brown’s Class Coordinating Board recently reached out to Melaa to organize their “CCBack to School” event in partnership with Hazel Origin Coffee. The event saw “a line out the door,” Kaur said.
When searching for a co-founder with a technical background, Kaur reached out to Earth Mokkamakkul ’25 on LinkedIn. The pair later connected and worked on five different projects — including a dating and social media app — before settling on Melaa.
Pursuing entrepreneurship at Brown taught her that “you’re allowed to think big — you don’t have to live a small life,” Kaur said.
Pre-seed to seed funding
Once startups agree on a fully formed idea, the next obstacle is to secure substantial initial funding — often referred to as seed funding — to get the company off the drawing board.
Erik Vank and Aryan Sawhney are both currently backed by Y Combinator, which provides seed funding, and taking time off from Brown to build their AI video editor, Narrative. The two co-founders first met during the orientation event for Innovation Dojo last fall, where they worked together to build a smart lamp.
The first iteration of their idea — an AI ad-builder — was inspired by a 2 a.m. conversation between Vank, Sawhney and two of their friends at a hackathon, Sawhney said.
On June 15, at an afterparty for a Y Combinator event, Vank decided to pitch “everyone on the social media ads idea — like, every single person,” he said.
He then approached a VR headset company and asked, “Hey, do you need social media ads?” After seeing some initial client interest, they decided to flesh out the idea. Sawhney and Vank decided to pivot to building a video editor after seeing companies and individuals struggle to process, sort and edit hours of event footage, Vank explained.
Upon getting accepted into the fall 2025 batch at Y Combinator, Vank said the decision to take a semester off from Brown came easily. “There wasn't really a moment when I considered not doing it,” he added. “I think this is kind of what I wanted to do with my life.”
Sawhney was initially more reluctant. “There was a fair amount of hesitation, especially from my parents, early on,” he said. But after talking to his co-founder, Sawhney decided it was the right time to pursue Narrative and “make everything else work around this.” He said he would “just call (his) parents up and say, ‘Okay, I'm doing this,’” Sawhney said.
Sai Mandhan — a former member of The Herald’s Tech Team — and Vishnu Sreenivasan was the second pair of Brown students accepted into Y Combinator’s fall 2025 batch. Mandhan and Sreenivasan are building Remedy, an AI pharmacy technician aimed at making pharmacies more operationally efficient. When helping his grandfather refill his medications, Mandhan realized that “technology could do a lot to make that process more efficient,” and the idea was born.
Mandhan said the two co-founders submitted their application to Y Combinator at the end of the spring semester, but were initially rejected.
After spending the remainder of their summer building the product, the team was accepted into the fall cohort, Mandhan said. When they were accepted, “I literally could not stop smiling,” he added. “I was just in utter disbelief.”
The $500,000 of funding provided by Y Combinator has allowed Remedy to more aggressively pursue product development — covering employees’ living expenses, enabling them to hire lawyers to gain compliance certifications and providing financial support for conference attendance and sponsorship.
Living in California, Mandhan has observed that “the entrepreneurship scene at Brown is a lot more mission-driven compared to what I would describe in San Francisco,” he said. There, “the focus is a lot more on building a big company, and the focus at Brown is a little bit more on the value-add you bring to the world.”
