Seven Brandeis Startups Pitch at 2026 Brandeis SparkTank
There's a particular energy that fills a room when student founders are about to pitch the work they've poured a semester into. On Thursday, April 30, that energy filled the Rapaporte Treasure Hall, where seven Brandeis teams took the stage for the annual SparkTank pitch competition, a culminating moment for the cohort, and a window into what the next generation of founders is building.
The setting was fitting. Rapaporte Treasure Hall, with its warm wood and its quiet sense of occasion, has a way of making whatever happens inside it feel like it matters. And on this particular afternoon, what happened inside it was a remarkably wide-ranging set of ideas, from construction-industry workflow software to a tea brand reimagining how Americans encounter Chinese tea, from AI-powered sports recruiting to a platform that turns shared meals into the antidote to student loneliness.
The Seven Teams
The afternoon's pitches moved fast, ten minutes apiece, and they covered impressive ground.
GetTogether, from Hui Wen and Daniel Kadenbach, tackled a problem nearly every student knows: it's surprisingly hard to find someone to take a walk, study, or work out with on short notice. Their app matches nearby users for spontaneous, real-time activity meetups, turning a quiet afternoon into a connection.
FieldRails, a solo effort from Hardik Shukla, took on the construction industry's tangled estimation and handoff process. The platform uses AI to speed estimating up while keeping the auditability and human judgment construction actually needs.
Signal, from Jai Deshpande, addressed a problem familiar to anyone who has run a small business: critical information scattered across spreadsheets and SaaS tools. Signal builds custom dashboards for businesses that don't have a data team, figuring out what the operator actually needs to see, and putting it in one place.
MakeMySchedule, from the team of Vivek Hein, Salah Maalim, Musa Albalakhi, and Bhanu Immani, turned its attention closer to home. Brandeis students piecing together a course schedule have long juggled multiple tools and tabs; MakeMySchedule consolidates the process with smart filters, an AI chatbot, drag-and-drop building, and a one-click Google Calendar export.
ORINTEA, from Xi Yu and Mo Chen, made the case for a new entry point into Chinese tea for American consumers. Their pitch for a premium Chinese tea emphasized whole-leaf quality, intuitive flavor profiles, and an everyday wellness experience.
Strangers, the team of Ivy Tran, Sherren Jielita, Gerald Deng, Jenny Park, Michael Leung, and Linh Nguyen, delivered one of the afternoon's most resonant pitches. Their platform pairs students for face-to-face meals. They are built on the premise that real connection often starts across a table and aims to build a lifelong ecosystem for belonging out of those shared moments.
Field Vision, from Elan Romo and Gabriel Diaz, closed out the pitches with an AI-powered sports recruiting platform. By making it dramatically easier for athletes to produce quality highlight reels, the team is opening a path to visibility for players who might otherwise never land on a college recruiter's radar.
An Impressive Judging Panel
The judges who weighed in on these pitches brought a remarkable combination of operating, investing, legal, and academic perspective:
- Venkat Maroju, MBA, Executive in Residence at Brandeis School of Business and Economics, named one of the Top 25 Tech CEOs of Boston for 2024, with twenty-five-plus years leading enterprise technology and digital transformation.
- Elizabeth Durst, MBA/MA SID '20, Senior Associate for Pipeline and Partnerships at the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, whose career spans inclusive entrepreneurship, justice tech, and global accelerator work.
- Debarshi Nandy, PhD, Barbara and Richard M. Rosenberg Professor of Global Finance at Brandeis School of Business and Economics, whose research sits at the intersection of fintech, applied AI, and entrepreneurial finance.
- Pito Salas BA '76, founder of Boston Robot Hackers, Brandeis Computer Science Professor Emeritus, and the entrepreneur credited with inventing the pivot table at Lotus in the late 1980s.
- Adam Cohen BA '12, corporate associate at Wiggin and Dana LLP, who advises emerging companies from formation through funding.
It's the kind of panel that asks the questions founders most need to hear and the kind of feedback you can't easily get anywhere else.
And the Winners
After deliberation (and a showcase with refreshments and People's Choice voting), the awards ceremony delivered the results:
- First Place: FieldVision. A practical, well-scoped use of AI to expand opportunity for athletes outside the recruiting spotlight.
- Second Place: Strangers. A platform whose vision that belonging gets built one shared meal at a time clearly landed with the judges.
- Third Place: FieldRails. An ambitious play to bring real workflow discipline to a fragmented industry.
- Audience Choice: MakeMySchedule. The Brandeis crowd recognized one of their own: a tool built for the very students doing the voting.
Congratulations to the winners, and to every team who pitched. There's something genuinely moving about watching student founders stand up in front of judges, peers, and a packed room to defend an idea they believe in. It takes work to get there, and it takes nerve to do it well.
A Note of Thanks
SparkTank is the product of a lot of people behind the scenes. Thank you to the Spark team — Fern Shamis, Rajnish Kaushik, Yinyin Chen, and Gianna Crisha Saludo — for the hundreds of details that go into running a program like this. Thank you to the Brandeis Office of Technology Licensing and the Brandeis Innovation Center, which make innovation programs possible. And thank you to every mentor, advisor, family member, and friend who showed up to cheer these founders on.