Introducing the VentureBridge '25 Startups!
June 20th, 2025 - Steven Guo
The CMU VentureBridge (VB) program is back again and excited to announce its investment in 14 startups as a part of the CMU VB ’25 funding cycle. Our CMU-alumni-founders span all across the country and hail from the School of Computer Science, College of Engineering, and Tepper School of Business, where they are building solutions across AI infrastructure, intelligent agents, robotics, healthtech, cleantech, and industrial automation.
Over the past month, our founders have gone coast to coast from our in-person Kickoff Week in the San Francisco-Bay Area to our first Demo Day of the program in New York City as part of a16z’s NY Tech Week - which was also the public debut of our companies! During our Kickoff Week, the cohort met over 2.5 days of intensive programming spanning multiple fireside chats with venture capital firms, VB alumni-founded startups, and large mixers and networking events in San Francisco and Palo Alto, CA. On the opposite coast in New York City, over 100 investors and key CMU supporters joined us at Pillsbury’s Midtown Manhattan office and heard the VB ‘25 cohort pitch alongside a few VB alumni portfolio companies.
Thank you to our partners who were involved in supporting our first month of programming: Pillsbury, Smith Point Capital, Rackhouse Venture Capital, Silicon Valley Bank, AI Camp, Moon Creative Labs, CBRE, CMU Tech & Entrepreneurship, 99 Tartans, and the CMU Alumni Association.
Below you will find a quick overview and description of our VentureBridge ‘25 companies. However, stay tuned for spotlight interviews we conducted at the beginning of the program to learn more behind the scenes about who are the CMU alumni powering these startups as they tackle venture-scale problems.
April (spotlight coming soon)
Vertical: AI / Productivity
Location: San Francisco, CA
Founders: Neha Suresh (CMU Integrated Innovation Institute) and Akash Thakur (SUNY Binghamton)
One Liner: April is helping you to arrive at work at inbox zero and a perfectly organized calender.
April is an AI personal assistant to help you transform your commute into productive time. Just by using your voice you can handle emails, schedule meetings, check your calendar, and manage your day in the span of your commute and arrive organized and ready -- before you even get to the office.
Blume
Vertical: Consumer Products
Location: Palo Alto, CA
Founders: Andreas Fastchel (CMU CIT Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering)
One Liner: Blume is selling the world’s first disinfecting wipe dispensing system that is safe for people, pets, and the environment.
Clear Solar Corporation (spotlight coming soon)
Vertical: Clean Tech
Location: Pittsburgh, PA; Rochester, NY
Founders: Michael Provenzano (CMU Tepper School of Business), Cedric Corpa de la Fuente (Institut supérieur d’électronique et du numérique)
One Liner: Clear Solar is bringing space-grade dust mitigation technology to the solar industry.
At Clear Solar Corporation, we are addressing the critical problem of reduced solar energy generation due to dirt, dust, and debris accumulation on solar panels. Dirty solar panels can significantly reduce energy output, leading to lower performance, increased operational costs, and decreased return on investment for solar energy systems. Worse yet, large volumes of water usage used to clean utility scale farms can wreak havoc on the local environment by straining local water resources and subsequently impacting agriculture, wildlife, and local communities. Water-based cleaning methods can also generate wastewater that contains dirt, bird droppings, and cleaning agents. This runoff can pollute nearby soil, water bodies, and groundwater.
Our ClearAdvantage system is solving this issue with a technology called the electrodynamic dust shield (EDS) to optimize solar panel efficiency, reduce long-term maintenance costs, and eliminate water usage and environmental pollution from solar panel cleaning. ClearAdvantage integrates a thin, laser-etched metallic film with the solar panel cover glass. We then use our own proprietary electronics to deliver precise, phased voltage pulses. These pulses electrostatically charge and dislodge dust particles from the panel surface, transporting them away via a controlled traveling-wave electric field.
Edulis Therapeutics (spotlight coming soon)
Vertical: Life Sciences / Therapeutics
Location: Nashville, Tennessee
Founder - Spencer Matonis (CMU CIT Materials Science and Engineering)
One Liner: Edulis Therapeutics is bringing the next big thing in GI care by developing the first drug-delivery implant system for patients with chronic GI diseases.
Edulis Therapeutics is a medical startup looking to reinvent how we treat patients with chronic GI diseases. The venture was founded in 2022 by Carnegie Mellon PhD and former NASA engineer, Spencer Matonis, alongside two GI doctors: Dr. Vladimir Lamm (UPMC) and Dr. Juan Reyes Genere (Henry Ford Health). The team's specialized endoscopic delivery system offers patients targeted drug delivery for up to twelve months of maintenance-free symptom management, making modern medications safer and more effective. Edulis is currently raising seed capital to fund pre-clinical testing of its lead asset, an anti-inflammatory implant for Crohn's disease.
Flaflow
Vertical: AI
Location: Palo Alto, CA
Founder - Sean Hengxiao Tao (CMU School of Computer Science)
One Liner: Flaflow is building the interface between humans and AI, providing a framework so you can teach AI what you want it to do, so that it will do it reliable and at scale.
We've gotten so used to AI making up things that we've even come up with a term for this: hallucinations. AI not listening to you or making up things is now expected. However, it doesn't have to be this way. Flaflow is a framework that allows you to communicate exactly what you want to your AI, so it can do your tasks, reliably and at scale. Just like how you'd teach a new intern how you want things to be done, with Flaflow, you can teach AI exactly what you want to do. It will then remember and do what you need, as you want it.
Early use cases include researching (recruiting, VC, sales), simple negotiations and booking management, and even coding (understanding a specific database and writing queries on it, given a set of rules to follow). The TAM is huge -- just like how IP is the protocol for how computers talk to each other or how browsers are how humans talk to the internet, Flaflow wants to be the interface between humans and all AI apps.
Fort
Vertical: Consumer Tech / Wearables
Location: San Francisco, CA
Founders: Miranda Nover (CMU CIT Mechanical Engineering), Paul Schneider (University of California Riverside)
One Liner: Fort is building a wearable companion for your muscles for total-body health.
Kaavio (spotlight available)
Vertical: AI
Location: San Francisco, CA
Founders: Derek Gregg (CMU Tepper School of Business), Samuel Bobb (Northwestern University)
One Liner: Kaavio is building the agentic future of how factories, labs, and job sites buy $8.5T in technical products.
Kashikoi (spotlight coming soon)
Vertical: AI agents
Location: San Francisco, CA
Founders: Aaksha Meghawat (CMU Language Technologies Institute), Tim Michaud (Abilene Christian University)
One Liner: Kashikoi is building the simulation to instantly benchmark your AI agents.
Kashikoi is a simulation engine for you to instantly benchmark your AI agents. We generate CPU friendly world models that autonomously interview agents and generate deep behavioral assessments. We built a similar technology at Moveworks which was used to ship 250+ enterprise agents to customers daily.
Mesh Software, Inc.
Vertical: AI / Fintech
Location: San Francisco, CA
Founders: Nandini Ramakrishnan (CMU CIT Electrical and Computer Engineering), Erin Kim (Washington University in St. Louis)
One Liner: Mesh is democratizing access to financial insights through your own AI accountant co-worker.
OctaPulse (spotlight coming soon)
Vertical: Ocean Tech
Location: Pittsburgh, PA; New York, NY
Founders - Paul L. Grech (CMU Tepper School of Business), Rohan Singh (CMU School of Computer Science), Andres Castrillon (CMU CIT Mechanical Engineering)
One Liner: OctaPulse is building the future of autonomous aquaculture, starting with AI-powered computer vision to automate deformity inspection in juvenile fish.
We are addressing the challenge of juvenile fish grading and deformity inspection in aquaculture hatcheries. This process remains manual, inconsistent, and labor-intensive. Today, hatchery technicians must visually inspect thousands of fish by hand, leading to high error rates, operational bottlenecks, and stress that compromises fish survivability. These inefficiencies make it difficult for farms to scale while maintaining health standards and profitability.
OctaPulse’s solution automates fish grading using AI-powered computer vision. It delivers real-time, high-accuracy insights into size and health while removing the need for manual handling. Our modular system is purpose-built for hatcheries, where most existing technologies do not function effectively. By creating a proprietary dataset of fish abnormalities, we are unlocking scalable data intelligence for precision aquaculture. The result is reduced fish loss, improved efficiency, and the ability for farms to track quality and grow sustainably.
Kaavio's Founders: Samuel Bobb and Derek Gregg
OctaPulse's Founders: Rohan Singh, Paul L. Grech, Andres Castrillon
NY Demo Day Presentations
Outdoor terrace reception at Pillsbury's office
Networking with VB Founders
Quivly AI
Vertical: AI / Fintech
Location: San Francisco, CA
Founders - Tanay Agrawal (CMU Tepper School of Business), Chandrika Maheshwari (MIT Sloan School of Management)
One Liner: Quivly AI is creating AI agents for the post-sales teams turning your revenue operations into a growth engine. Think Clay for post-sales teams!
Sabana (spotlight coming soon)
Vertical: AI / Construction Tech
Location: San Francisco, CA; Pittsburgh, PA
Founders - Ruben Quesada (CMU Tepper School of Business), Saket Kulkarni (CMU School of Computer Science)
One Liner: Sabana is an AI-powered platform that helps architects and engineers streamline product selection and construction specification workflows.
Sabana is an AI-powered data management platform built for architects and engineers to streamline product selection and construction specification workflows. Founded by Ruben Quesada and Saket Kulkarni, Sabana helps design teams reduce manual work, improve collaboration, and manage continuous design changes with real-time cross-referencing and automation. The platform also offers manufacturers visibility into how their products are evaluated and selected. Sabana was part of the Techstars AI 2024 cohort and 3rd place winner of the McGinnis Venture Competition at CMU.
Solstis
Vertical: AI / Productivity
Location: San Francisco, CA
Founders - Pratik Satija (CMU School of Computer Science)
One Liner: Solstis is transforming workflow automations by letting users create, executie, and visualize automations in real time - as easy as typing. Imagine having a group chat where your app agents talk to each other, execute workflows on command, and learn over time - like a team that never sleeps.
Wood Wide AI
Vertical: AI
Location: Pittsburgh, PA
Founders: Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science Founders
One Liner: Wood Wide AI is transforming raw numbers into numeric intelligence.
Wood Wide AI provides specialized neuro-symbolic AI approaches that are purpose-built for the complexities of numerical data, enabling organizations to derive transparent, reliable decision‑grade numeric intelligence that current language‑centric AI models cannot provide.
Quivly AI's Founders: Tanay Agrawal and Chandrika Maheshwari
Solstis' Founders: Pratik Satija (CMU School of Computer Science) and Samika Sanghvi (University of Pittsburgh)
Fireside Chat with Dylan Fox (AssemblyAI) and Smith Point Capital
Rob Miller (VB '23) asking a question to Dylan Fox
Akaash Ramakrishnan (VB '21) and Pratik Satija (VB '25)
Congratulations Founders!
We welcome you to follow, invest, and champion our startups. Come see them pitch in-person at our upcoming VentureBridge 2025 Demo Days in Pittsburgh (September 24th) and San Francisco (October 8th)!
VentureBridge, Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship
June 20th, 2025
Thank you to our Swartz Center Patrons
