Introducing our Spring ‘22 Cohort + Growth Portfolio 🚀

Duke Innovation Studio 🚀
4 min readFeb 19, 2022

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To the Duke community and greater startup ecosystem:

We’re thrilled to announce Duke Innovation Studio’s Spring 2022 Entrepreneurship Cohort and Growth Portfolio!

Our goal is to support the incredible entrepreneurship community on campus — through workshops, guest speakers, networking opportunities, funding, and of course, our annual accelerator cohort. We’re a group of Duke students providing other Duke student entrepreneurs with the platform, resources and technical support for success.

Born out of Duke Applied Machine Learning, Duke Innovation Studio partners with Duke’s Innovation & Entrepreneurship Department, Fin VC, Rev Starts and more, to turn student ideas into reality.

Sourced from a competitive applicant pool across Duke’s undergraduate and graduate ecosystem, our diverse and disruptive founders include Division 1 athletes, merit scholars, award winners, and serial entrepreneurs. Their work has already received praise from entrepreneurs, VCs and even the Elon Musk Foundation! We’re excited to welcome them to the DIS family.

Without further ado, here is our Spring ’22 entrepreneurship cohort:

SPRING ENTREPRENEURSHIP COHORT ’22 🚀

Allergood

Founder: Michelle Addison (Duke Fuqua ‘23)

AltSocial

Founders: Leo Akers (Duke ‘22), Samarth Lamba (Duke ‘22)

Audiown

Founder: Will Tenpas (Duke ‘23)

EZTrain

Founders/Team: Benjamin Lu (Duke ‘22), Roberto Medrano (Duke ‘21), Thomas Chemmanoor (Duke ‘22), Will Maynard (Duke ‘23), Jonathan Chang (Duke ‘24)

Pickle

Founders: Alex Deans (Western University MD ‘23), Marcus Deans (Duke ‘22)

Stapoo

Founders/Team: Aayushi Patel (Duke ‘25), Ishita Gupta (Stanford ‘25), Aditya Gaur (Duke ‘25)

Congratulations to this cohort — we can’t wait to work with you this semester!

This year, Duke Innovation Studio is debuting the newest addition to our entrepreneurship program: The Growth Portfolio.

These high growth startups have demonstrated incredible traction, and we can’t wait to help them succeed!

We are excited to welcome Biosorra and Holoriff to the Growth Portfolio:

GROWTH PORTFOLIO ’22 🚀

Biosorra

Founders: Ines Serra (Fuqua x IESE ‘22), Sofie Dejaegher (Autonomous University of Barcelona ‘21), Vinoshen Vinayagam (IESE ‘22)

Biosorra transforms crop waste into crop yield to improve agricultural output while sequestering carbon out of the atmosphere. Biosorra is one of 23 winners of Elon Musk’s XBRIDGE Carbon Removal student competition.

Holoriff

Founder: Andres Montoya-Aristizabal (‘22), Head of ML: Nishanth Singaraju (‘22)

Creating the future of Human Computer Interaction!

We are thrilled to provide any support, resources, and networking opportunities possible to all of our cohort and portfolio startups!

If you’re interested in learning more about these startups and impressive founders — email our team at dukeinnovationstudio@gmail.com and we’ll be happy to set up a call with you, the founders, and our team!

To all Duke student entrepreneurs: we’re ready to help in any way we can. Come explore what we have to offer!

Thank you all for your continued support of student entrepreneurship and innovation. We couldn’t do this without you.

Best,

The Duke Innovation Studio Team 🚀

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Duke Innovation Studio 🚀

We’re Duke Innovation Studio (DIS) — Duke University’s student-run startup accelerator. We ❤ student entrepreneurs!