The SageTank event is hosted each year by the 5C student organization . Winners receive funding to invest in their startup, and all competitors receive publicity and networking opportunities to help jumpstart their companies.

First-place winner was developed and pitched by Kevin Xia ’28, Daniel Zhu ’29 and James Gómez CMC ’27. Whistle is an agentic NCAA compliance software designed to help athletic departments stay compliant with NCAA regulations, an often complicated and time-intensive process. The software allows anyone within an NCAA athletic department to ask a compliance question and receive precision answers, citing exact bylaws, within 30 seconds.

“NCAA compliance is a huge issue, with teams having dedicated staff answering these questions from everyone within the athletic department in order to stay compliant,” said Xia. “The impact of Whistle is twofold: It helps the compliance officer find answers to the questions they get faster, and with extreme precision so NCAA compliance infractions don’t occur.”

The idea for Whistle grew out of the co-founders’ love of playing competitive soccer. All three play for the Claremont-Mudd-Scripps (CMS) men’s soccer team, and their athletic and entrepreneurial pursuits intertwined.

“A lot of our teammates actually are very entrepreneurial, and that definitely helped,” said Zhu. “That environment allowed us to get really close and decide to work together.”

Their first product iteration, CoachBooks, was built specifically for college athletics coaches and developed directly with CMS soccer coach Edward Cartee.

“We love competition and winning, and entrepreneurship is a domain in which you are directly competing with others,” said Xia. “There is nothing else like it. For example, to get our first customer, we literally bought a cake and walked into their office asking for five minutes of their time and turned a ‘no’ into a ‘yes.’ That feeling of ‘cold-caking’ someone to get your first customer, working late at night with your best friends even when no one is watching, building something of your own and growing it—that feeling is indescribable.”

Xia also credits the academic courses and programs at 91̽�� Mudd and the other 5Cs for providing valuable knowledge, skills and mentorship. Xia took both semesters of Enterprise and Entrepreneurs with instructors Josh Jones ’98 and Benson Tsai ’06. The team worked closely with Entrepreneurship Studio director and computer science professor Zach Dodds. Xia also went through the program, a 5C student-run accelerator that helps student founders scale their ventures by providing capital, mentorship and staffing.

The Whistle team will use their $5,000 prize to work full-time this summer on growing the company. The team is eager to keep the momentum going and welcomes contact from interested parties.

Hotspots—caused by shaded solar cells overheating—pose a serious fire risk in solar installations. The team’s proposed solution, idealPV—solar panel technology patented by Kent Kernahan—continuously monitors dynamic conductance and adjusts current flow in milliseconds, preventing reverse bias before it begins. Described by the team as “the airbag of the solar industry,” this technology can keep solar arrays operating safely and efficiently—especially important in high-risk wildfire areas like Southern California.

91̽�� Mudd sophomores Felix Peng (team lead), Amy Li, Anika Sharma and Katie Cheng were inspired by past research led by physics Professor Peter Saeta.

“My involvement began with a Clinic project to validate Kernahan’s patented technology, which evolved into a full-blown research effort,” says Saeta. The resulting paper, co-written with 91̽�� Mudd professors Richard Haskell and Qimin Yang and five students, was published in the December 2022 IEEE Journal of Photovoltaics. “It was exciting when Felix approached me about entering the DOE competition. I’m thrilled with the team’s win.”

After being selected as an EnergyTech UP finalist and receiving a $5,000 prize, 24 multidisciplinary teams of post-secondary students from universities across the U.S.—pitched their innovative business plans to industry stakeholders and OTC leadership to bring a DOE National Laboratory-developed or other high-potential energy technology to market.

Peng, who competed in DOE challenges during high school and recently with mathematics Professor Weiqing Gu, assembled the team after revisiting Saeta’s published research. “We wanted to build a business case around an innovation with local impact,” he says. “In Southern California, solar innovation and wildfire risk are high, so safety innovation like idealPV made sense to us.”

Each team member brought a distinct strength:

• Engineering major Peng led project management and stakeholder outreach.
• Computer science and mathematics major Li conducted market sizing and economic feasibility analysis.
• Computer science and mathematics major Sharma developed the implementation and scalability strategy.
• Engineering major Cheng focused on articulating the technical edge of idealPV in the competitive solar landscape.

Peng says, “IdealPV eliminates the fire risk problem entirely by dynamically monitoring the slope of the current-voltage curve (dynamic conductance) and adjusting current in real time to keep every cell in safe operating range. We created a full implementation and licensing plan: launching a local pilot with nonprofit CHERP Solar Works, scaling through licensing to larger manufacturers and aiming for industry-wide adoption.”

The team’s success stemmed from a combination of personal connection to the problem, technical fluency and stakeholder validation—including input from firefighters, utilities, nonprofits and solar startups.

“This competition has been a springboard to so many opportunities in the climate tech space,” says Sharma. “I’m grateful for all the connections it brings.”

Student involvement in national STEM competitions reflects 91̽��’s goal of fostering a diverse cohort of engaged STEM leaders through exceptional teaching, learning and research.

“The team at 776 is tasked with backing exceptional founders as early as possible in their journey, giving potential founders the space and time (and money) to build something great,” states the 776 Fellowship website.

O’Hara will pursue his startup Apsis Robotics, which is focused on carbon capture technology to help the environment. He was inspired to launch his business after taking the spring 2022 Entrepreneurship class at 91̽�� Mudd.

“With his passion for climate change and his entrepreneurial abilities, I honestly believe he will change the world,” said course instructor Kash Gokli, Oliver C. Field Professor of Manufacturing Practice and Engineering Economics and inaugural director of entrepreneurship initiatives.

O’Hara has an extensive research background in climate change. He has conducted research at the University of Arizona, the University of Washington, NASA and the Sea Education Association. He has participated in a data gathering expedition with the Sea Education Association and developed new theoretical climate-related technologies with NASA. He has disseminated climate research information by speaking at the recent United Nations COP27 climate conference and collaborating on the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change 6th Assessment Report (as the representative of the Association of Polar Early Career Scientists, of which he is the youngest-ever co-chair). He was selected by the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation as a 2023–2024 Astronaut Scholar.

With a desire to apply his scientific expertise to real-world applications, O’Hara launched Apsis. Its flagship product, an autonomous engineered system, mitigates the effects of ocean acidification and supports vulnerable marine ecosystems. The company’s robots can sustainably convert carbon dioxide in seawater (one of the primary drivers behind ocean acidification) into calcium carbonate (a basic compound which naturally keeps seawater at a healthy pH), dramatically slowing local acidification and creating more habitable environmental conditions for nearby reefs and ecosystems.

O’Hara says, “We hope to work with and sell to coastal governments, near-shore aquaculture firms and ocean conservation entities—groups with a vested interest in mitigating ocean acidification—to effectively protect and restore marine life.

“In the long-term, I hope to scale this technology and use it to support and rebuild reefs and other nearshore ecosystems all around the world until our society achieves net negative carbon emissions,” he says. “I believe that one of the primary roles of climate technology is to support failing ecosystems and mitigate the consequences of climate change in the short-term until we’re able to develop and implement the long-term economic and social changes required to truly rebuild the environment, a mission that drives Apsis’ work.”

As a member of the executive team of the Association of Polar Early Career Scientists, O’Hara works with the UN on climate policy. “One of the major things I’ve learned from this work is that the oceans experience some of the most severe consequences of climate change but seem to be neglected in global climate policy and talks. Ocean acidification, in particular, is an outcome of climate change that isn’t discussed enough: if our oceans continue to acidify, we’ll see the complete collapse of countless marine ecosystems, which will threaten the food security of billions of people, leave coastal communities more susceptible to ocean storms and flooding, and devastate Earth’s biodiversity. As a result, I wanted to use my knowledge of this space and technical expertise to fill this perceived gap in the climate movement’s work, and so Apsis was born.”

During his last semester before graduating, O’Hara will participate in 91̽�� Mudd’s entrepreneurship Clinic Program while also working on his startup and participating in the 776 Fellowship program.

At the SageTank event held in April, teams from around The Claremont Colleges shared startup pitches with a panel of experienced judges and a live audience. Winners received funding to invest in their company, and all competitors received publicity, networking opportunities and a jumpstart from the accelerator program.

All top teams, including the third-place finisher from Pomona College, had participated in the Entrepreneurship class taught by Kash Gokli, Oliver C. Field Professor of Manufacturing Practice and Engineering Economics and director of entrepreneurship initiatives. The popular course, open to all Claremont Colleges students, is part of HMC’s effort to strengthen and expand its curricular and co-curricular activities to nurture the next generation of entrepreneurs. The class is aimed at those who would like to: launch a startup upon graduation or later; join established companies and apply their entrepreneurial skills and spirit; or be social entrepreneurs. Ayman Abdelletiff ’23 co-creator of Athena Network, said, “It was great to be in an environment that really nurtured our respect and passion for entrepreneurship.”

The winning startups and team members were:

1st place: Axolotl Audio, Devon Overbey ‘24, Pierce Gruber ’25, Xander Fries ‘24

2nd place: Brakesafe, Mau Brave Guzman ’25, Dominick Quaye ’25, Ket Hollingsworth ‘25

3rd place: David De Souza (Pomona College)

4th place: Athena Network, Ayman Abdelletiff ‘24

Axolotl Audio

Devon Overbey, Pierce Gruber and Xander Fries will use their $5,000 prize to develop a prototype this summer and prepare for their first sales. The team began as a music startup last semester in the entrepreneurship class. During spring, they pivoted to traffic management. Their product uses audio from a microphone to detect the speed of passing cars and transmits that data to the cloud. Fries says, “Our device is 10 times cheaper than existing speed-monitoring devices, enabling HOAs and cities to continuously collect speed data on dangerous roads to make streets safer for everyone.”

He adds, “I’m extremely thankful for everyone who’s helped us get to this point and excited to see what’s ahead in the next few months.”

Brakesafe

The founders note that automatic emergency braking, the largest improvement to car safety since the airbag, is not present in the majority of operating cars, let alone those made before 2018. The feature is more effective than forward-collision warning alarms at reducing car collisions, which result in 1.35 million deaths each year. Their product, Brakesafe, is an installable automatic braking system for motor vehicles which utilizes an open-source algorithm capable of detecting imminent collisions, pedestrians and red lights.

Athena Network

Athena Network is a mobile-based application that supplies students with valuable resources to get the most out of their college career. The design focuses on three major aspects of the college experience: college courses, community engagement and creating a new way for students to network.

Fiber optic light-up ski poles and an affordable analog software for musicians and sound engineers were among the startup business models presented by students on the final day of 91̽��’s new Entrepreneurship Workshop class. Student teams develop an innovative idea for a product that solves customers’ unmet needs and then create a scalable business model for their startup.  

The course is a hands-on, practical class that helps students create a model for their startup with significantly less money in a short timeframe. The class is taught by Kash Gokli, founding director of entrepreneurship initiatives and professor of manufacturing practice and engineering economics.

“All of the presentations were great, and each student brought an interesting perspective to their product and company,” Gokli said. “Not everyone here will go on to start a company, but they’ll at least learn how it is done and how to set the building blocks if they ever have an idea they want to run with.”

Six groups presented various products and services, including a college-experience enhancement platform, a college-based marketplace mobile application, fiber optic light-up ski poles and an affordable analog software for musicians and sound engineers.

“We started off creating an analog synthesizer, but after talking to potential customers at music stores, we found that people really don’t care all that much about them,” Xander Fries ’24 said. “We took that feedback and shifted to talking to customers in active markets.”

Fries said that the chip and software he has developed with his classmates Devon Overbey ’25 and Pierce Gruber ’25 will help cut down by hours the time it takes for sound engineers to reset high-quality studio mixing consoles.

“This class taught us how to approach and talk to our target audience to gather information that would help us shift accordingly,” Gruber said. “Anyone thinking about getting into entrepreneurship needs to be comfortable with getting out and talking to everyone in their target audience. It is one of the most important steps when getting started with a product.”

Ayman Abdellatif ’24 teamed with fellow classmates Ammar Fakih ’24 and Lucas Welch CMC ’25 to create a mobile application that aspires to enhance the undergraduate college experience.

“Athena Network is a one-stop shop that provides college students with all of the resources they may want,” Abdellatif said. “Our goal is to connect students with other students, staff, faculty and, most importantly, their community.”

The Athena Network team discussed its initial hypothesis, showcased a full application overview and presented a three-year forecast for the company.

“I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur, even when I didn’t know what that meant,” Abdellatif said. “After hearing about all of the things that Josh Jones is doing as an HMC alumnus, that really inspired me to text Ammar, my childhood best friend, to get something going.”

In addition to being an entrepreneur (DreamHost founder) and investor, Josh Jones ’98 and Gary Evans, professor of economics emeritus, co-founded HMC INQ (a finance company that invests in HMC alumni and their startup companies) and 91̽��’s Angels, a network of HMC alumni who invest in 91̽�� Mudd-related companies.

Jones also helps teach the Entrepreneurship Workshop class alongside Gokli.

“I love seeing these teams’ enthusiasm as they go through this semester-long journey and how they have to pivot and adapt with their idea,” Jones said. “Students getting into entrepreneurship shouldn’t think too hard and just go for it. A few years down the line they may be breaking even and be happier than if they were somewhere else.”

To learn more about 91̽�� Mudd’s entrepreneurship courses and resources, visit the Entrepreneurship website.

“For this college-wide program, companies tell us what they’re looking for, students do the same, and then we match them up,” says Kash Gokli, inaugural director of entrepreneurship initiatives and Oliver C. Field Professor of Manufacturing Practice and Engineering Economics. He notes that both the students and the companies reported numerous benefits.

The student view

“I did research on campus before, but I also wanted to see what it’s like in the industry, and see my engineering knowledge being applied,” says Jenny Wathanakulchat, a senior engineering major who spent 12 weeks as a test-and-integration engineer intern at the robot-pizza-making company Stellar Pizza. Besides reviewing new components and reporting back to the design team, she also helped communicate the technology to its end-users, she says. “One of the biggest things I learned was how to incorporate the human aspect—engaging with operators to make sure everyone knows how the tech works and how to do it safely.”

Stellar Pizza had one intern, but other participating companies accepted more. One was Aquilius, a life science and medical technology incubator that brought in interns from several schools, including three from HMC. Interns attended lecture-style meetings centering on the ins and outs of running a new tech company, while also working in teams to solve one of several real-world, biology-related problems. “The idea was that we would create a little company from the start, develop actual prototypes and finally present that project to a panel of investors who would vote on which company had the most potential for moving forward,” explains junior engineering major Devon Overbey. To sweeten the pot, Aquilius offered  a $10,000 prize for the top team project.

“The whole experience was solid,” Overbey says. “I’ve been thinking about starting a company since high school, but this internship definitely made me feel more confident in my abilities, especially the fact that my team’s project showed promise to actual investors, and we ended up winning the prize, which we split three ways. That was really cool.”

The company view

Two of the other participating companies included Flycoin, a cryptocurrency-based, frequent-flier-loyalty program, and Trilo Bio, a robotics synthetic biology startup.

“We wanted HMC interns because Mudders are amazing,” said Nate Daiger, Flycoin CTO. “I’ve met lots of them through and if you’re looking for smart people who can jump into any tasks and tackle them with aplomb, I don’t think you can do any better. And that’s what startups need most.” The company’s three Mudd interns excelled, he commented. “Everyone here, including many HMC grads, were extremely impressed with their skill and diligence.”

Trilo Bio decided to offer an internship because it was “an opportunity to nurture a relationship with a 91̽�� Mudd student just beginning their career,” says co-founder and CEO Roya Amini-Naieni. “When I was younger and just starting out, someone let me join their research team. What I’ve found is that people who are given an opportunity [early on] tend to work harder and be more creative because it’s their first chance,” she says. She was not disappointed, describing her company’s intern, first year Arman Khasru, as a “super-independent” person who dove right into a microfluidics project to assist with genetic engineering experiments. “He was our first intern ever at the company, and he did well,” she says.

What’s next?

With the program’s successful first-year in the books, Gokli now hopes to expand it. “My plan is to make it a bigger-impact program, perhaps even doubling the number of students who participate.” To do that, he encourages other companies to either contact him by email or phone or fill out the website form. He notes that HMC fully or partially funded some of the internships in 2022, so he is seeking other ways to sponsor students in 2023 and beyond. “This is especially important for students who are perhaps disadvantaged or are first-year students and typically would not get a nice internship like this,” he says, noting that the investment helps students build their portfolio of knowledge and experience.

The benefit to students is real, agrees Wathanakulchat. “Mudd is a very hands-on experience already, but it’s still not ‘real’ compared to the outside [business world]. It’s a really good, comforting moment to see that what you did in classes actually applies. It’s very validating.” Besides, she adds, “I had such a good time.”

The new class, led by HMC engineering professor and the director of entrepreneurship initiatives Kash Gokli, had an enrollment of 63 students from each of the undergraduate Claremont Colleges and CGU (73% from HMC). One of the class sessions was about “How to Find a Co-founder.”

“It was fascinating to see the students reaching out across the colleges to find co-founders for their companies,” says Gokli. “I saw cross-college teams with members from HMC, CMC and Pomona leveraging students’ strengths from other colleges.”

The course is part of HMC’s effort to strengthen and expand its curricular and co-curricular activities to nurture the next generation of entrepreneurs. In addition to HMC alumni entrepreneurs and others who shared their success stories and covered topics of interest during class sessions, the 10 teams came up with startup ideas and worked on them throughout the semester. Projects included apps for more efficient road trips, to convert freeways into free markets, to decentralize art and to streamline the giving process. Student teams also pitched ways to connect makers with consumers and to help schools provide better instruction for complex 3D concepts.

Mentors included Josh Jones ’98, DreamHost co-founder and co-founder of the startup incubator HMC INQ, and HMC trustees Sergio Monsalve P25 and Mar Herschenson P24.

“I was blown away by the level of student energy, the quality and the breadth of projects students worked on,” says Herschenson. “This class is an important step to inspire our students to become great entrepreneurs.”

“It was very encouraging to see students’ interest in entrepreneurship,” says Gokli. The class is aimed at those who would like to launch a startup upon graduation or later, students who want to join established companies and apply their entrepreneurial skills and spirit and students who would like to be social entrepreneurs. “Entrepreneurial skills and an entrepreneurial spirit can benefit students in all career paths.”

The winning teams—Athena led by Ayman Abdellatif ’24 and Terra Robotics led by Ryan O’Hara ’24—will pitch to well-known venture capitalists in northern and southern California this summer.

Athena

Ayman Abdellatif ’24 describes Athena as modern class registration to help students graduate. According to his research, 50% of four-year college students and 80% of two-year college students don’t graduate due to finances, academic disqualification, poor socialization and other factors. With a focus on course preparation, student connection, on-demand tutoring and local community engagement, the Athena service would require colleges to pay a subscription per student. Along with Abdellatif, who is CEO of Athena, Ammar Fakih ’24 is CTO,  Lucas Welsh CMC ’25 is CMO and Andrew Faber ’24 (UC Riverside) is senior software developer.

“Ammar Fakih and I were talking about wanting to do something meaningful during our time at 91̽�� Mudd,” says Abdellatif. “I had been in ID049 for a couple weeks and decided that over our short time at Mudd, Ammar and I had enough experience to at least dabble in the tech industry. Ammar had wanted to develop a resource like Hyper-schedule that expanded on the idea of scheduling courses effectively. At the same time, I had also been brainstorming an app I like to call FlashPolitics that allows citizens to see short, yet educational, bullet points on elected topics to inform people of their options. Putting these ideas together we created Class Pages, which is currently a key feature of Athena. Class Pages allows for students to get more information such as: course syllabi, hours spent on a course outside of class, and even course recommendations about all their possible courses in an organized mobile app.”

Abdellatif says the class has inspired him to become an entrepreneur. “After listening to all the guest speakers and meeting with them at the pre-class dinners, I began to see my dream of being a CEO develop. These awesome alumni showed me how it’s possible to chase that dream, even at a young age. Moreover, the guidance of Professor Kash Gokli, Josh Jones, and Mar Hershenson allowed me to get this far with my team. Having successful people who believe in my team and our dream has been a key aspect in our progress.”

Terra Robotics

Citing rising sea levels, increasing temperatures and climate-fueled conflict as issues that affect everyone, Terra Robotics founder Ryan O’Hara ’24 sees direct air capture as a solution that benefits everyone. DAC technology pulls CO2—the primary greenhouse gas driving climate change—from the air and sequesters it away beneath the Earth so it can no longer warm our planet. The Terra Robotics product is a DAC robot that floats on the ocean and uses hydropower and biochar to sequester carbon dioxide. O’Hara says it is sustainable, cheap to produce, produces net negative carbon emissions and aligns with cutting-edge DAC science. Terra Robotics would target 154 coastal governments around the world.

O’Hara, a sophomore transfer student double majoring in environmental robotics (IPS) and math/CS, has considerable experience in the climate science community. He worked at NASA in 2020 on the development of a water purification system that could mitigate the effects of future droughts; in 2021, he took a research expedition on the Atlantic to study the impacts of climate change on marine ecosystems, and he worked with the United Nations on recent climate assessment reports to study the ways the climate crisis is projected to impact human civilization.

“All of this has shown me firsthand how severe and serious climate change is and will become in the coming decades, and I started my company with the hope that I could use the skills I’ve developed to make a difference in the fight against the climate crisis,” O’Hara says. “The class gave me the push to put something into action I’ve been thinking about for a few years now: using science to make the world a better place and help those who’ll be most impacted by climate change. I also got a lot out of the guidance provided by both the guest speakers and Mar Herschenson, founder of a venture capitalist firm and one of our guest speakers, who gave me valuable advice on how to move my idea from theory to reality.”

This summer, along with team members and engineering majors Devon Overbey ’24 and James Barrett ’24, O’Hara will begin prototype design. Within the next year or two, they hope to have a prototype that achieves the desired parameters so they can begin to scale up. “Five years from now, we hope to have a significant number of units deployed in the ocean.”

Visit the Entrepreneurship site for more information.

“This is an exciting opportunity,” said Gokli, Oliver C. Field Professor of Manufacturing Practice and Engineering Economics. “There are a lot of initiatives already happening at 91̽�� Mudd, and now we can bring it all under one umbrella and add more, to create a truly impactful entrepreneurship program. It’s not a question of whether we will be successful or not, it’s a question of how far we can take it.”

Gokli will collaborate with a multi-constituency working group on entrepreneurship co-chaired by trustees Sergio Monsalve P25 and Bob Hulse ’96/97 and faculty members Albert Dato and Darryl Yong ’96, to design and support a set of curricular and co-curricular activities that will nurture Mudd’s next generation of entrepreneurs. Gokli will build upon the substantial legacy of Gary Evans, professor of economics emeritus, and the ongoing efforts of the 91̽�� Entrepreneurial Network.

“We want to provide opportunities to students from their first year through the fourth, so they can learn and grow and become entrepreneurs,” Gokli said. “Starting with seminars, workshops, events, summer fellowships and eventually coursework, we hope to provide education, practical experience, networking and funding opportunities.”

“Entrepreneurship education is not only for those students who want to start their own companies,” said Gokli, “but also for students who want to join an already established company or become social entrepreneurs to impact society. Entrepreneurial skills and an entrepreneurial spirit can benefit students in all career paths.”