CMU Student Startups Turn Campus Ideas Into Real Revenue

RapidEye, a property-inspection startup co-founded by Carnegie Mellon undergraduate Sam Parks, is deployed on 3,000 properties. Haru, an AI scheduling app from two other CMU students, placed fourth in the Deloitte Consulting National Undergraduate Case Competition. SpoilSafe, a five-student engineering venture, is targeting a global food-waste problem that exceeds a trillion dollars a year.

All three operate out of the same pipeline: Carnegie Mellon's Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship, which provides mentorship, grants and workspace to student founders across the university's seven schools and colleges.

"Carnegie Mellon students are building solutions with the potential to strengthen our region and shape industries," said Damion Shelton, associate vice president and executive director of the Swartz Center. "The Swartz Center helps them turn that ambition into action by connecting them with the guidance, resources and entrepreneurial community they need to test their ideas and move them forward."

Scheduling as a living log

Haru, an AI-powered personal scheduling app, was built by information systems major Poom Eamsobhana and computer science major Parin Pengpun. The founders take a contrarian approach: where most AI scheduling tools put the calendar first, Haru acts as a long-term interactive log that draws on multiple information sources to build a responsive schedule.

"Haru compares the goals you say out loud against the week you actually lived, and shows me the gap kindly like someone on my side, never a scold," Pengpun said. "Haru reads my life, and can rebuild any view of it at any time."

The product grew directly from student life. "We're all overachievers here at CMU. Just as students, there are so many clubs and so many activities that you want to do," Eamsobhana said. "We all try to pack everything into our schedule."

Eamsobhana and Pengpun, alongside teammates Iris Hao and Jazzmin Abarentos, finished fourth in the Deloitte national case competition. Eamsobhana said the experience pushed him to switch from a business major to information systems, a degree that combines technical and interpersonal training.

Computer vision at the property scale

Sam Parks, a rising senior studying business and human-computer interaction, co-founded RapidEye with Rohan Nagabhirava, a master's student in electrical and computer engineering. The company sells computer-vision technology to property owners to scan buildings for issues manual inspections miss.

"The same advancements that are happening for self-driving cars and vision for robot factories with object detection are the same technology in our product," Parks said.

RapidEye works with property management companies administering anywhere from 20 to 1,000 properties each. "We're deployed on 3,000 properties total now," Parks said. "For some property management companies, we figure out what works together. Other companies are hands-off."

Parks tested heavy automation with Anthropic's Claude model, including having it write cold emails, and rejected it. "What I figured out was this is actually a terrible strategy," he said. "People still like that human connection when they get a cold email or get on a call. People want to feel like they're talking to a human, and when they detect it's AI, they just completely go blank."

Sensors for the cold chain

SpoilSafe, founded by five CMU engineering students — Rohan Ganesh, Troy McBride, Aneesh Pataballa, Vivaan Sawant and Advika Vuppala — builds pallet-level environmental sensors that detect early signs of spoilage for warehouses and distributors.

"We use pallet-level environmental sensors to detect the early signs of spoilage before it happens, so warehouses and distributors can decide in real time whether to keep, discount or pull inventory," Ganesh said.

The team, with roots in family farms, cites figures of over a trillion dollars in annual global food waste and fourteen percent of shipments lost between harvest and retail. "Once we built it and looked at where the real scale of the issue lived, it pointed us upstream to warehouses and distribution, where most loss happens before a consumer ever sees the product," Vuppala said. "That's when it became a B2B company."

SpoilSafe developed through CMU's Project Olympus incubator and received a Spark grant from the Swartz Center. "They gave us a table in the fall semester, and by the spring we had a startup garage to work out of as the business kept growing," Ganesh said.

The infrastructure behind it

The Swartz Center's Undergraduate Innovation Scholars program has accepted 121 applicants since 2016. Its James R. Swartz Entrepreneurial Fellowship has taken 248 graduate students since 2005, with 12 more to be selected this fall.

Meredith Meyer Grelli, CMU's inaugural vice provost for entrepreneurship, frames the stakes in terms of durable skills. "In the age of AI, this ability to find opportunity in uncertainty, to iterate, to take risks and bet on themselves is one of the most durable gifts we can send our graduates out with, whether they go on to start a company, run a lab, write policy or make art," she said.

The student ventures will be on display during CMU Startup Week, which coincides with StartUP PGH, a week-long showcase positioning Pittsburgh as an anchor for entrepreneurship and frontier technologies. For a university long known for spinning out AI and robotics research, the pipeline now runs through undergraduates too.