Carnegie Mellon University

LaunchCMU

A Technological Startup and Research Showcase

This year we jointly celebrated the new Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship space at the new Tepper Quad and LaunchCMU. Our entrepeneurship space is located in a unique new building, where the convergence of people and ideas will help solve the greatest challenges we will face, together.

LaunchCMU showcases entrepreneurship at CMU — cutting-edge research and innovations from students, alumni, faculty and staff — while bringing together the investment community, regional business leaders and CMU alumni.


Thank you to our sponsors.

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Oracle logo
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Schedule of Events

Lumishield Speaker

Showcase Talks

4:00 - 5:00 pm Simmons Auditorium

Hear @CMU presentations by CMU student, faculty and alumni startups.

photo of student demonstrating his product

Demo & Poster Session / Networking Reception

5:00 - 7:00 pm Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship

See the latest from CMU student, faculty and alumni startups and network with other entrepreneurs and investors. 

Refreshments will be served.

Fall 2018 Demo & Poster Session Exhibitors

Anactisis Logo

Anactisis, LLC

Scandium: from valorization of coal ash to enabling new technologies and markets

Thanasis Karamalidis
Clint Noack
Prachi Jain

Scandium delivers immense value in civilian industries, including in aerospace, renewable energy, metallurgy, and advanced manufacturing, and potential improved performance in medical and automotive applications. Volatile prices, the geographic concentration of production in China, and the nature of current production technologies have raised concerns about the stability of its supply chains and availability. A key to enhancing and stabilizing Sc supplies is technology development that will enhance its conventional sources and unlock unconventional sources.  

ARM Logo

Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing

Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing (ARM)

Suzy Teele
Dr. Byron Clayton
Dr. Gary Fedder

Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing (ARM) is the nation’s leading collaborative in robotics and workforce innovation.  Structured as a public-private partnership, we accelerate the advancement of transformative robotic technologies and education to increase U.S. global manufacturing competitiveness. One of 14 Manufacturing USA Institutes, ARM was formed by Carnegie Mellon University in January 2017 and operates as a separate non-profit entity.

Arieca LLC Basic Logo

Arieca, LLC

Thermally Conductive Rubber - THUBBER

Navid Kazem
Carmel Majidi
Eric Markvicka

Arieca produces a thermally conductive rubber that has mechanical properties of soft rubber while heat conducting properties similar to some metals like stainless steel for passive cooling in embedded electronics, aerospace and automotive applications.

Banter Logo

Banter (漫谈)

Let's "Banter" - An app for cross-cultural engagement

Frank Mann Dolce
Andy Novak

Banter (漫谈) facilitates interactions between diverse campus community members by notifying users when they're interested in similar trending topics. The app is being marketed to universities as a subscription service, as a way to promote a diverse and dynamic campus environment, and also as a way to show off their diversity to the world.

Bloomfield Robotics Logo

Bloomfield Robotics

The Confluence of Artificial Intelligence and Agriculture

Eric Felix
Tim Mueller-Sim
Harjatin Baweja
Tanvir Parhar
George Kantor
Lily Smith

The bottleneck in effective agricultural robotics is weak camera technology, and we have solved that problem. Bloomfield Robotics can improve specialty crop growers' revenue by 30% with its fleet of camera systems and artificial intelligence.

Choitek Logo

Choitek

ASPIR Advanced Humanoid Robot

John Choi

Choitek is Pittsburgh's friendly neighborhood humanoid robotics company that builds awesome humanoid robots to teach and inspire.

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Corporate Startup Lab

Corporate Startup Lab: Project Course

Sean Ammirati
Matt Crespi

Does your company have an idea you want to explore? Don’t have the time or resources to fully examine it, but think it could be transformative?  Join a cohort of peer companies and work with Carnegie Mellon University graduate students to investigate what’s possible over the course of a semester.

ConvMind

ConvMind

Tony Zhao
Kyusong Lee
Yilian Liu

ConvMind is fundamentally changing how businesses attract, retain and interact with customers by using the power of AI to achieve complex tasks through conversation. Founded by world-leading experts in deep learning dialog systems, ConvMind gives businesses the power to easily create customized AI-driven chatbots that can engage users long-term in tasks ranging from marketing to medical diagnosis.

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Delta Band

Matt Spettel
Gabe Madonna
Gerry Chen

The Delta Band is a strength training wearable tailored to athletes and trainers. Using machine learning, the Delta Band automatically recognizes and tracks a variety of strength exercises, provides valuable fitness metrics to trainers, and allows coaches to deliver customized workouts to the wrist of every athlete.

Ekto VR Logo

Ekto VR

Brad Factor
Robert Li
Chen Ruo
Michael Brough

Ekto VR develops immersion-enhancing products for the 10 Million users in the $3.7 Billion Virtual Reality market. Our current product, a compact motorized wearable, solves the locomotion problem by making walking around in expansive virtual reality as simple and natural as everyday life, while only requiring an 8 by 10 foot physical area.

ESTAT Actuation

ESTAT Actuation

Electroadhesive Clutch Demo

Stuart Diller
Dr. Carmel Majidi
Dr. Steven Collins

We are creating dynamic and efficient robots using ultra-lightweight, low power electroadhesive clutches.

Expedition Logo

Expedition: The Game

Expedition: The Game

Todd Medema
Scott Martin

Expedition is a hybrid physical / digital storytelling adventure game that's raised over $80,000 on Kickstarter - and just today launched a new Science Fiction-themed expansion. Swing by our table for a quick demo of the future of gaming.

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Expii, Inc.

Expii

Po-shen Lo

Expii delivers a personalized math/science learning solution through smartphones, powered by a suite of algorithms curating a platform of crowdsourced content.

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GT Entrepreneurs

Gabriel Chick
Bobby Septak
Dave Jasnos
Phil Hahn

We are a group of entrepreneurs looking to transition the ownership of your business via acquisition and subsequent direct management of the company.  In addition to one of our operators assuming the Chief Executive role, we provide experienced advisers who are actively involved in providing support and domain expertise during the transition and beyond.

Heart I-O Logo

Heart I/O

Non-Invasive Detection of Coronary Artery Disease

Nick Flanigan
Utkars Jain
Michael Leasure
Adam Butchy
John Marous
Emerson Liu, MD
Dr. Ruslan Salakhutdinov
Veronica Covalesky, MD, FACC

Heart I/O is an AI based healthcare company focused on cardiovascular diagnostics.

Honeycomb Logo

Honeycomb Credit

1972

Christian Bilger
George Cook
Ken Martin
Chesley Zhu
Sophia Fang

Honeycomb Credit is a platform that allows locally owned businesses to borrow from their own loyal customers and community members.  Using crowdfunding, we are unlocking capital for the small businesses that make our communities safe, fun, and vibrant.

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LumiShield Technologies

LumiShield Technologies

Dave Luebke
Prof. Hunaid Nulwala
Dr. John Watkins
Dr. Xu Zhou

LumiShield Technologies is commercializing an inexpensive, sustainable anti-corrosion coating, which replaces toxic metal coatings like chromium and cadmium.

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Nabla Ascent

10x faster, 20x cheaper - 24/7 inventory monitoring using drones

Geetesh Dubey
Sankalp Arora
Daniel Maturana
Robb Myer

Nabla Ascent’s AI and Deep Learning engine enables drone autonomy technologies for providing data analytics solutions. We are focused on providing autonomous data gathering solutions for inventory/asset tracking in warehouses. Inventory taking with ground robots is unfeasible due to elevated heights and complex layouts of warehouses. Manual data gathering process for such applications is slow, inefficient, unsafe, hence the application provides a market opportunity of $3.1B TAM, globally. Our technology enables fleets of hand sized drones to automate the inventory/asset tracking in environments without GPS while reducing the costs by 10X and making inventory/asset tracking 8X faster.

Nimbus Robotics Logo

Nimbus Robotics

Make everywhere within your walking distance

Xunjie Zhang
Boris Rubinstein
Elijah Richter
Randy Sargent
Dave Mawhinney

We believe that walking should be an efficient alternative to owning a car, biking, or taking public transport, everywhere for everyone. Nimbus Robotics are building robotic shoes to enable commuters walking faster without extra efforts. By strapping our bionic shoes over your everyday shoes, you can make walking a mile take half of the time.

Norilla Logo

NoRILLA

Novel Research-based Intelligent Lifelong Learning Apparatus

Nesra Yannier
Ken Koedinger
Scott Hudson
Amanda Sari Perez
Kashyap Nishtala
Ji Jin
Sofia Sill
Nayeon Kim

NoRILLA is a patent-pending award-winning mixed-reality system bridging the advantages of physical and virtual worlds to improve children's STEM learning. Research conducted at Carnegie Mellon University has shown that it improves children's learning by 5 times while also increasing enjoyment.

Processly Logo

Processly

Albert Topdjian
Rehan Butt
Luke Hottinger
Eddy Man Kim

Processly is an adaptive learning web platform that uses an infinite online whiteboard, making it easy for teachers, businesses, and schools to apply modern teaching methods. We do this by creating a play-space for learners to document, reflect, and communicate within a collaborative environment throughout their learning process, all the while providing key insights.

Rayar Logo

Rayar

Max Henkart

Computer vision accuracy suffers from image artifacts caused by system-level camera design and production tolerances. Rayar connects companies' real-world camera performance with their traditional algorithms and deep learning networks.

Redcell logo

Redcell, LLC

The Redcell Blockchain Talent Exchange

Logan Hammerschmitt
Chris Hale
Rich McCormack
Dick McCormack
Daniel Nichols
Jeff Martin

Redcell's Talent Blockchain is the first technology to leverage blockchain and AI to solve issues related to workforce development, recruiting, education, and employment. By verifying the employment and education histories of candidates, Redcell affords companies the piece of mind that they are receiving accurate information and quality candidates.

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RistCall, LLC

Ameya Bhat
Srinath Vaddepally
Nihal Hasan

RistCall is a smartwatch based patient-nurse communication platform aimed at improving patient safety, experience and quality of care.

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Root Health

Root Health

Raj Sharma
Eric Ghildyal

Clinical trials are burdensome for patients and lead to a 49% dropout rate. Root Health automates and personalizes patient management to ease the burden of clinical trials. Root lowers dropout rates, saves over 26K per patient and accelerates drug discovery.

Sign Track Logo

Sign Track

Sign Track: Automatic ASL Recognition

Brandon Taylor
JoAnna Taylor

Sign Track is developing automatic American Sign Language (ASL) interpreting software to facilitate communication between Deaf and hard of hearing individuals and the non-signing population.

TalkMeUp

TalkMeUp

TalkMeUp

JJ Xu
Grey Yang
Zhuoni Yang

TalkMeUp is an AI based SaaS company focused on communication training.

Wicklets Logo

Wicklets

Make Games, Animations, and Everything In-between

Luca Damasco
Zachary Rispoli

Wicklets is an educational technology company creating easy to use tools for making games, animations, and interactive projects by combining digital art, illustration, and computer programming. 

Yodel Labs Logo

Yodel Labs

ALPS: High Accuracy Indoor Localization for Smartphones and Tablets

Patrick Lazik
Anthony Rowe
Nick Wilkerson

Yodel Labs develops innovative indoor localization technologies for smartphones and tablets. Its award winning product, The Acoustic Location Processing System (ALPS), provides industry leading accuracy and enables next generation location-based applications, such as fine-grained retail analytics, wide-scale, multi-user Augmented Reality, and high accuracy indoor navigation for the visually impaired.

Zensors Logo

Zensors

AI powered visual sensors

Anuraag Jain

Zensors AI platforms allows you to use existing camera infrastructure to create virtual sensors that provide answers to critical business questions.

Watch the talks and presentations from our October 2, 2018 Event

Fall 2018 Swartz GO Tepper Quad / LaunchCMU

Watch the talks and presentations from our May 16, 2018 Event

LaunchCMU Spring 2018

Watch the talks and presentations from our October 10, 2017 Event

LaunchCMU Fall 2017


Watch the talks and presentations from our May 23, 2017 Event

LaunchCMU Spring 2017