A professional promise

It is a common refrain among alumni of Carnegie Mellon University: A CMU education is the best way to prepare for founding and running a business.

And there is now a way for Tartan entrepreneurs to return the favor to CMU and its students, all while boosting their own business-building efforts.

The Tartan Entrepreneur’s Pledge (TEP) is a personal, non-binding pledge to provide philanthropic support to CMU when the stakeholder’s business achieves financial success. Pledge signers can access CMU’s ecosystem of entrepreneurship resources, like the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship, as well.

“My professional path looks like a straight line going from school to several jobs in AI robotics to this startup,” said Yuhan Long, co-founder of international robotics company Infermove and one of the first TEP signers. “CMU is the starting point of all of that, so I 100% feel if I can get some level of success in my entrepreneurship, CMU will definitely deserve to be recognized as a big part of that success. That’s why I wanted to be a part of the pledge.”

Yuhan, who earned a master’s degree in Robotics Systems Development in 2015, co-founded and serves as chief technical officer for Infermove, which is designing and building a series of last-mile delivery robots. The most advanced model is called Carri FLEX, and it can literally pick up and hand off packages with an attached robotic arm.

And although it took more than five years from receiving his master’s to start Infermove, the concept had been on Yuhan’s mind since his days in Pittsburgh.

“The idea of building a startup had been with me for a very long time,” he said. “What I got from CMU was not just the training in the details of mechanical engineering, computer science, programming, algorithm, all of those. But it also taught us to think about all of this in a system perspective — you're always looking at it from a top down perspective.”

A CMU education didn’t just give Chelsie Hall the foundation to build her startup, social video monitoring company ViralMoment. It also led to the opportunity to find the niche her company works to address.

Following her 2018 graduation with a master’s from CMU’s Integrated Innovation Institute, Chelsie worked for the federal government, helping to build disinformation detection systems for the U.S. Departments of Defense and State. Monitoring text-based social platforms like Facebook or X wasn’t difficult; those tools had existed for a while. But Hall found that nothing existed for the fast-growing social video platforms like Instagram or TikTok. 

“We’ve gone from that to a powerful technology that can read and interpret videos at scale,” said Chelsie, who founded ViralMoment with fellow CMU alumnae Sheyda Demooei in 2021. “Think about the power of being able to read 1 million videos a day and interpreting them to determine what’s trending and what’s not.”

That power has already attracted clients from Taco Bell to Coca-Cola to DC Comics, all of whom are looking for help measuring customer satisfaction, tracking trends or watching for intellectual property concerns.

“This is advanced trend surfing,” Chelsie said. “We're all at the mercy of our algorithms — but we help companies see past algorithm fog with data.”

Chelsie and Yuhan, both early signers of TEP, are examples of the kind of visionary founders who have made big bets on their education, their ideas and their skills, said David P. Bennett, CMU’s vice president for university advancement.

“Educating and supporting the next generation of entrepreneurs has always been a goal at Carnegie Mellon, whether we’re talking about in the classroom or in the office once they’ve begun,” he said. “The Tartan Entrepreneur’s Pledge is a way for our new founders to continue to take advantage of the university’s support system while positioning themselves  to support those who will follow their paths in the future.”

Chelsie said she decided to sign the pledge almost upon hearing about TEP for the first time.

“I’ve always admired the ecosystem at CMU — the university is so challenging, but that advice and experience is always available to students and alumni,” she said. “And the idea of continuing that support and getting yourself into a position to be able to be a bigger donor in the future — that made signing the pledge an easy decision.”