It’s been more than six months since the 2022 Cal Poly Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) Summer Accelerator came to an end. During the Accelerator, Cal Poly students and recent graduates spent 13 weeks immersed in the startup process, turning their startup ideas into real, viable businesses.

The program culminated in Demo Day, where the participating teams showcased the progress they made on their startups throughout the summer and pitched their companies.

Since Demo Day, the 2022 Summer Accelerator cohort have embarked on new professional, educational and — of course — entrepreneurial endeavors.

Here’s a team-by-team breakdown of what the cohort is up to now:

Castle Innovations LLC | Cheekies | Quickie | Ryde | Venture Rent | X-Adapt

 

Castle Innovations (Formerly known as Grip Safe)

Castle Innovations LLC founder Shaun Tanaka entered the Summer Accelerator with an idea to save lives: a patented firearm safety device for AR-15s called GripSafe.

Tanaka said he and his team conducted extensive customer development during the Summer Accelerator. They produced multiple iterations of the product, each one improving upon its predecessor. 

“While our mission never changed, our product changed drastically,” Tanaka said.

Their current iteration, called the CastleLock, uses high-speed biometric locking technology to secure AR-15s from unwanted users and negligent discharges.

Tanaka said he has “dove head first” into the startup process since Demo Day. He was able to secure a round of angel investment, which allowed him to hire mechanical engineers from a design firm and expand the company team. Castle Innovations LLC now has 16 total team members.

“Without the Summer Accelerator, so much of the company wouldn’t have happened,” Tanaka said. “With the help of the CIE, we were able to get angel investment, mentorship, resources, and access to engineering shops that we otherwise would not have had access to.”

Shortly after Demo Day, Tanaka began pursuing his Masters in Public Policy at Cal Poly. He said he has been leveraging his graduate education to best benefit his startup.

“I found myself tailoring my Masters program to my startup,” Tanaka said. “Being in the Masters of Public Policy program, it’s helped me navigate the complexities of firearm legislation, which is currently helping progress the business.”

Dylan Defazio, who worked for Castle Innovations LLC as an independent contractor during the Summer Accelerator, also returned to Cal Poly after Demo Day as a mechanical engineering junior.

Defazio said he picked up several tips and tricks throughout the Summer Accelerator that have helped him as he pursues his degree. Organizational tools like Notion, an online note taking application, and communication techniques he learned through the program have been especially helpful, he said. 

Although Defazio is no longer working with Castle Innovations LLC, he has remained involved with the CIE. He is mentoring students who are interested in applying to the Summer Accelerator, as well as helping students prepare for Innovation Quest (iQ), an innovation competition that Defazio and Tanaka won third place in in 2022. 

Defazio took notes — on Notion, of course — throughout the Summer Accelerator program. He uses those notes to inform his advice to fellow student entrepreneurs. 

He met most of his mentees through the Hatchery, the CIE’s on-campus startup incubator — the same program through which he met Tanaka.

“Seeing a lot of new ideas come through the Hatchery was awesome,” Defazio said. “That’s why I love mentoring — because you’re around the Hatchery. I just love the spirit of entrepreneurship.”

 

Cheekies

McCall Brinskele, founder of Cheekies, set out to help menstruators sleep comfortably while on their periods by inventing a period sleep short that uses leak-proof technology.

Brinskele, a biomedical engineering major, had minimal business or entrepreneurship experience when entering the Summer Accelerator, but quickly adapted to the startup process.

Throughout the course of the summer, Brinskele became adept at the “business side” of the startup process learning entrepreneurial skills like customer development and, of course, pitching.

“Pitching every single week, I definitely became more confident speaking in front of investors,” she said.

Brinskele said she and co-founder Mariana Inofuentes were “pumped” for Demo Day.

“I mean, as you can see in the video (of our pitch), we were having so much fun on that stage,” Brinskele said. “I was really eager to keep going. It was nice to get that recognition for all the work that we had done, and it was very motivating to know that what we were doing was going to make a difference in people’s lives.”

Since Demo Day, Brinskele has continued  to work on Cheekies and is currently gearing up for a pivot. She has not disclosed the details of the pivot, but said that she is currently in the customer development stages.

“(We are) making sure that we’re making a product that’s really going to meet needs and change lives since that was the goal from the beginning,” she said.

Brinskele is also pursuing her Masters in Engineering Management at Cal Poly. Participating in the Summer Accelerator “gave (her) an edge” in her Masters classes, she said.

She is currently working on Cheekies’ pivot as a project for her Masters program.

Brinskele said the Summer Accelerator helped her build the skills needed to tackle the pivot. The program also provided validation that Cheekies, which started as a passion project, has the potential to not only sell, but to change people’s lives for the better.

“Getting that encouragement from the Accelerator, as well as all of the training,” Brinskele said. “I don’t think I would be able to pivot right now if I didn’t have all those tools.”

 

Quickie

Business administration majors Matt Menno and William Tregenza entered the Summer Accelerator to further develop their startup Quickie, a quick and affordable delivery service for college students that soft-launched in November of 2021. 

“We thought we knew a lot about the business that we were making because we’d already been at it for a few months, but after making it through the Accelerator, we were not even close to experts on Quickie,” Tregenza said. 

Menno spent the summer developing a mobile application for Quickie, while Tregenza focused on marketing — and pitching.

Tregenza said the Summer Accelerator helped him grow comfortable with public speaking.

When the co-founders debuted their startup at the CIE’s May Entrepreneurship Forum before the Summer Accelerator began, Tregenza said he “paused on stage.”

“I literally just got shocked on stage,” Tregenza said. “Then, by the end of the Accelerator (at Demo Day), I was up there doing an eight minute pitch, easy.”

Since Demo Day, Quickie has grown significantly. Their mobile application has reduced customer check-out times from five minutes to roughly 20 seconds. 

Menno said CIE Director of Finance and Operations Damon Watkins recommended Quickie grow their team, telling Menno and Tregenza, “You need time to actually grow the business, whereas right now you guys are running it.”

They now have 12 employees who deliver orders, as well as an app developer and a marketing manager.

Quickie delivers to addresses within a two-mile radius of the Cal Poly campus. They recently acquired a storefront in the middle of that radius, which Menno said has helped Quickie “capitalize on (their) delivery speeds.”

Tregenza and Menno said they plan to expand to another campus within the next year — and use the skills they developed in the Summer Accelerator along the way.

“The skills you learn — the networking, the deep dive you take into your business model — all of that stuff has prepared us to analyze competitors and standardize our model here so that we can copy and paste it at other campuses,” Tregenza said. 

 

Ryde

Three co-founders joined the Summer Accelerator with their startup Ryde, a travel marketplace connecting college student riders with college student drivers for long-distance travel.

The Summer Accelerator provided the resources to grow Ryde from a student project to a real, scalable business, co-founder and Head of Customer Experience Johnny Morris said.

Ryde officially launched in October 2022. Since then, more than 3,500 Cal Poly students have signed up for the app. Ryde has facilitated more than 1,600 rides and helped students travel more than 450,000 miles. 

“We’re getting so much natural growth just through students telling each other because they love it so much and they had a good experience,” said Ryde co-founder and CTO Josh Wong. “I think that’s the most valuable sign of success.”

The startup also recently won $25,000 in funding at the Sunstone Cal State University (CSU) Startup Launch Competition, an annual pitch competition for CSU students and recent graduates. Competing teams are divided into three categories, including product, service and social enterprise. Ryde won the service track’s first-place prize.

All three co-founders are still working on Ryde — and embarking on their own professional endeavors. 

Wong is now in Houston, Texas working for NASA as a software engineering intern. At NASA, he is able to exercise his entrepreneurship knowledge almost as often as his software engineering skills.

“I hear methods of entrepreneurship — like building a minimally viable product,” Wong said. “I wouldn’t have known anything about that before the Accelerator.”

Morris graduated in June 2022, shortly before the Summer Accelerator began. Since the Accelerator, he has been working full-time on Ryde, as well as working part-time for another Accelerator alum, Quickie.

Morris said that, after having worked alongside Quickie during the Accelerator — not to mention running a startup himself — he is able to “bring something kind of unique to the table” and can “think more process-oriented, more strategically” about Quickie, he said.

Ryde co-founder and CEO Emily Gavrilenko also found an additional job through the Summer Accelerator.

Gavrilenko met an industry professional during the networking portion of Demo Day whose company was hiring. The connection eventually led to her current role as a product manager.

“I got the contact at Demo Day, and now I have a super sweet job,” Gavrilenko said. 

Despite their separate professional endeavors, the Ryde co-founders will continue to work together and leverage the skills they build in the Summer Accelerator to grow their startup. They said they intend to expand beyond Cal Poly, to other college campuses in California, over the next six months.

“We’ve done so much more in the past six months than we did in the first six months,” Gavrilenko said. “After the first six months, we had a super scrappy MVP out there. We hadn’t made a single dime. We’d done maybe 30 rides. No one really knew about us. Now, seeing how far we’ve come, it’s incredible.”

 

Venture Rent

Business administration major Shubh Khandhadia entered the Summer Accelerator as the co-founder of Venture Rent, a startup developing a mobile application that allows users to quickly and easily rent outdoor equipment, such as kayaks and surfboards. 

Two weeks into the Summer Accelerator, Khandhadia’s co-founder stepped down, and he quickly found himself promoted to CEO. Khandhadia, who also has a minor in computer science, leveraged the information he had learned in a Summer Accelerator workshop about software and technology in order to quickly develop a minimally viable product (MVP).

Developing the MVP allowed Khandhadia to focus on running the business, while his team of software developers continued to work on the product.

“This was my first experience in a startup, leading a team of developers and working with them every week,” Khandhadia said. “I learned throughout the Accelerator how to be an effective leader, how to work well with others and how to find people who compliment you.”

Khandhadia said Demo Day was a rewarding experience and an opportunity to celebrate all he had accomplished over the course of the Summer Accelerator.

Khandhadia compared the Summer Accelerator to studying, and Demo Day to a test.

“For me, leading up to the exam is the most stress. The exam is never stress because at that point, you’re just showing what you know,” Khandhadia said. “So for me, pitching (at Demo Day) wasn’t that bad — it was actually a really fun experience.”

Shortly after Demo Day, Khandhadia wrote down a list of goals for Venture Rent and a list of personal goals. After careful consideration, he decided to take a break from Venture Rent in order to focus on career development.

He decided to apply to graduate school — not for business, but for computer science (CS).

“I’d always wanted to go into computer science,” Khandhadia said. “I switched my major twice. I started in business, went to CS, went back to business, then tried to get back into CS but couldn’t. So I decided I would do a Masters in CS.”

Khandhadia was recently accepted into the University of Southern California (USC) graduate program. He will be studying computer science with a specialization in artificial intelligence (AI).

“My goal was to pair up my business degree with a more technical degree,” Khandhadia said. “Honestly, the startup experience was huge in motivating me to do that because I got to see the importance and value behind being an engineer.”

 

X-Adapt

Evan Lalanne entered the Summer Accelerator fresh off of a win at iQ. Lalanne won the first-place prize of $15,000 with his startup Adapted Mobility, now known as X-Adapt.

X-Adapt is a startup working to make “the world more accessible for people with disabilities,” according to Lalanne.

Lalanne’s iQ pitch — and later, his Demo Day pitch — was for a device that modifies commercially available electric unicycles to allow for use by adaptive riders in place of a wheelchair.

The device has greater mobility and capability than most wheelchairs, which allows riders to access environments with tougher terrain, like hiking trails. It is also compact, making it easier for riders to navigate crowded spaces, like bars or parties. The self-balancing feature in the electric unicycle even allows riders to climb up and down stairs — as Lalanne demonstrated at Demo Day during his pitch.

During the Summer Accelerator, Lalanne focused on product development. He also used Accelerator resources to grow his network.

“The best part of the program is definitely the network that you build,” Lalanne said. “You get connected with so many different mentors and people with varying backgrounds that are all motivated to help you out, and that’s huge.”

Since the Summer Accelerator, Lalanne has set up internal product development and prototyping equipment and is now finalizing his first customer-facing MVP’s.

He recently competed at the Sunstone CSU Startup Launch Competition, where X-Adapt won the product track’s second-place prize of $10,000.

Lalanne said he is planning to have early adopters provide feedback on the MVP’s during the second half of 2023 and is targeting early 2024 for early commercial sales.

 

It’s now been more than six months since these student-led startups completed the Summer Accelerator program — but in less than two months, a whole new cohort of promising entrepreneurs will set out on their own startup ventures.

Meet the 2023 Summer Accelerator teams at this year’s May Entrepreneurship Forum, May 16 at 4:30 p.m. in the Cal Poly Performing Arts Center. 

Tickets available for free here!

ARTIFEX is creating a data processing software that allows architects and designers to input data points and receive automated floor plans. Users can then export that data and use it to inform the next stage of the design process.

The idea for the tool stemmed from research that co-founder Elijah Williams conducted while pursuing a Master of Science in Architecture with Cal Poly. Williams’ original idea was for a hardware device that used a laser to collect measurement data. He brought that idea to the Cal Poly Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) in 2021 and joined the CIE’s Hatchery, a startup incubator for Cal Poly students.

Around that same time, Anna Baytosh, a Cal Poly Masters in Business Administration student at the time, approached the CIE looking to get involved and learn more about the startup process. The CIE connected her with Williams, and she joined ARTIFEX just in time to apply for the CIE’s Summer Accelerator program.

The Summer Accelerator is a three-month program that provides Cal Poly students and recent graduates with the resources needed to build a business, including $10,000 in seed funding. ARTIFEX was one of the nine startups accepted into the program in 2021.

By the end of the Summer Accelerator, ARTIFEX had successfully raised a small round of pre-seed capital. Baytosh, who had originally planned to leave ARTIFEX after completing the program, joined Williams as an official co-founder and became the startup’s COO.

Following the Summer Accelerator, ARTIFEX joined the CIE’s two-year Incubator program, which is designed to help early-stage startups develop into financially stable and scalable businesses. It connects founders with resources that can help facilitate growth, such as mentorship, networking events and funding opportunities.

“The Incubator provides a wealth of resources, from accounting, legal, marketing, finance — anything you really need to get your startup off the ground,” Baytosh said. “For us, it was about the Incubator helping us build that structure around what we had already created in the Summer Accelerator.”

Since joining the Incubator, ARTIFEX has pivoted from their original hardware idea to a software solution. They’ve also begun fundraising.

The Incubator has connected ARTIFEX with several fundraising opportunities, including AngelCon, an annual pitch competition hosted by the Cal Poly CIE Small Business Development Center (SBDC), where tech-driven startups from California’s Central Coast compete to win equity-backed funding.

ARTIFEX participated in AngelCon in 2022, and although they did not raise funding from the competition, Baytosh said it was still “an awesome experience.”

She described the preparation for the competition as a “pitch bootcamp.”

“We were able to hone our pitch and our strategy,” she said. “And we were able to meet more people that we were able to raise funds from later.”

In addition to helping the ARTIFEX co-founders meet prospective investors, the Incubator also introduced them to a community of fellow entrepreneurs.

“I would say, for a venture-backed startup, a network of advisors, investors and fellow founders is absolutely crucial because that’s what’s going to keep you going,” Baytosh said. “Those network connections are going to get you to the next step.”

It’s been almost nine months since the 2021 Cal Poly Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) Summer Accelerator came to an end. During the Accelerator, Cal Poly students and recent graduates spent three months immersed in the startup process, turning their startup ideas into real, scalable businesses.

The program culminated in Demo Day, where the teams showcased their hard work and pitched their companies.

Since Demo Day, our teams have grown as entrepreneurs and industry professionals. Here’s a team-by-team breakdown of what our 2021 Summer Accelerator teams are up to now:

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ARTIFEX    For Mom Care    HiLite    Intego Technology    kit & sis    OdinXR

S2 Monitoring Solutions    TractorCloud    Zoetic Motion

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ARTIFEX

ARTIFEX spent their summer creating a custom measuring tool to enable automation in the architecture industry.

Since the Summer Accelerator, ARTIFEX co-founders Elijah Williams and Anna Baytosh have expanded their team. They now have employees assisting with scientific research, technology development, customer development and market development.

According to Baytosh, the ARTIFEX team has been successful establishing their brand in the architecture industry. They are collecting feedback from architects who use their product and using that feedback to improve their innovation.

Baytosh said she also enjoyed “the opportunity to pitch [ARTIFEX’s] progress and talk to the community again” at the Cal Poly CIE Small Business Development Center’s (SBDC) AngelCon competition, held April 21 at SLO Brew Rock.

AngelCon is an annual competition for tech-driven startups on the Central Coast. ARTIFEX was one of the six startups competing for over $100,000 in funding in AngelCon 2022.

Weekly pitch workshops during the Accelerator prepared Baytosh to pitch in competitions like AngelCon, she said.

“The Accelerator helped get us moving and set a foundation for what a really good pitch looks like,” Baytosh said. “Now, being a few months out of the Accelerator and pitching to investors, we know what to say and what not to say.”

 

For Mom Care

The Summer Accelerator helped For Mom Care begin building a postpartum recovery platform to provide mothers with holistic support and ensure they properly heal after birth.

Co-founders Camila Mochini and Christina Grigorian used the program as an opportunity to refine their original idea for For Mom Care, which Monchini described as “a one-stop-shop for postpartum care.”

At the start of the Accelerator, For Mom Care wanted to connect users with physical goods, community, education and a network of medical professionals.

“We had a lot of ambitions, but quickly realized it wasn’t possible to focus on so many aspects at once,” Monchini said.

Monchini and Grigorian, following the advice of their mentors, narrowed their focus to connecting new mothers with postpartum education and a network of postpartum experts.

Monchini said she was excited to showcase her startup’s growth at Demo Day. 

“Pitching at Demo Day was exhilarating and nerve-wracking all wrapped up in one,” Monchini said. “Our eight-minute pitch seemed so long during the practice runs, and yet I felt like our pitch at Demo Day was over in a heartbeat.”

Following Demo Day, For Mom Care was invited to join the CIE Incubator, a two-year program for early-stage companies to develop into financially stable, high-growth enterprises. They are working with the Incubator to refine their business model and create the beta version of the For Mom Care platform, Monchini said.

Monchini said she is applying the lessons she learned during the Accelerator to her current work with For Mom Care.

“I [learned] it is key to surround yourself with people that believe in your team, believe in your mission and will bring positive and constructive energy to the table,” she said.

 

HiLite, formerly PowerMove

HiLite entered the Summer Accelerator as FEARLESS Fitness Kids, a startup working to keep children active by creating immersive video games with exercise as their core mechanic.

Over the course of the Accelerator, FEARLESS Fitness Kids rebranded and became PowerMove — and the rebrand was not the startup’s only change. PowerMove began to look at elementary schools as a customer segment, whereas FEARLESS Fitness Kids focused primarily on parents of young children.

Although PowerMove received investor interest at Demo Day, co-founders Sara Glaser and Madison Lewandowski are no longer pursuing the idea. Instead, they are pursuing HiLite.

HiLite — which stands for high-intensity, low-impact training exercise — is a workout methodology that uses patent-pending aerial loops and mini trampolines. It takes inspiration from dance, gymnastics and circus, according to Lewandowski.

“Our whole mission, since the beginning, is trying to make exercise fun,” Lewandowski said. “HiLite is a lot more in line with that.”

The central focus of HiLite is also more in-line with the co-founders’ expertise. Both Glaser and Lewandowski have backgrounds in dance. Glaser is also a certified personal trainer and yoga instructor.

“We’re now running a company where we are experts on the foundation of the company, whereas before, we had to hire other people to execute [our ideas],” Glaser said. “This is very much in our realm, and we feel confident in it.”

 

Intego Technology

Intego Technology entered the Summer Accelerator as Intego Sports, a startup striving to create the most durable and sustainable footwear on the market with their own patent-pending technology. 

Their mission remained the same throughout the course of the Accelerator, but they rebranded to Intego Technology after pivoting to sell their technology to manufacturers instead of selling directly to consumers.

Co-founders Alexandra Joelson and Samuel Andrews showcased their pivot at Demo Day. Joelson said she felt accomplished presenting her startup’s progress after months of hard work.

“The feeling on that stage was absolute shock that we’ve made it this far,” Joelson said. “The Accelerator supported us and pushed us to be the best entrepreneurs we could be.”

Since Demo Day, Intego Technology has continued to work with their team in Germany — a connection they established through the Accelerator — to manufacture their product and submit international patent filings.

“Our business became viable over the course of the Accelerator,” Andrews said. “We started the Accelerator with a company which wouldn’t have worked in real life. We still have room to grow, but now feel confident that our business can really work.”

 

kit & sis

kit & sis, a subscription craft kit company helping children explore their creativity and imagination through hands-on crafting, used the Summer Accelerator to fully immerse themselves in the startup process.

The startup, known previously as AG Sisters, was founded by Cal Poly business administration majors Madeline and Gabrielle Pollock and their childhood friend Kate Lally.

It was beneficial to work in a “collaborative space” throughout the summer, alongside “other students who are just as passionate about entrepreneurship,” Madeline Pollock said.

Opportunities like Common Rock were also beneficial, Gabrielle Pollock said. Common Rock is a workshop held at the end of each week of the Accelerator where participants exchange advice and discuss what they learned through their own startup experiences.

Since the Summer Accelerator, kit & sis has begun to sell their craft kits through local retailers in San Francisco. They are also continuing to hold crafting events, both in-person and online. 

kit & sis partnered with the Westin St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco to hold a “Dollie and Me Holiday Tea” in December of 2021. The event, which included a sit-down tea and crafting activities for children ages four and up, attracted over 200 attendees.

“Being able to work with the Westin and attract the crowd that we did, it was mind-blowing,” Madeline Pollock said. “It was truly fulfilling. We could see our childhood selves sitting out there in the audience.”

The Holiday Tea allowed the kit & sis co-founders an opportunity to see the real-world impact of their startup.

A mother accompanying three young girls to the event told Gabrielle Pollock that she often tells her daughter, “You could be like kit & sis one day. You can start a business with your best friends.”

“I’ve never seen myself as someone that other people look up to,” Gabrielle Pollock said. “Having that moment was really surreal and emotional and amazing.”

kit & sis intends to hold a similar event in December 2022, also at the Westin.

 

OdinXR

OdinXR entered the Summer Accelerator as a startup creating virtual reality landscapes for engineering students to conduct hands-on labs during online learning.

OdinXR founder and CEO Tessa Luzuriaga said the Accelerator was “a great place to be for engineers who really didn’t know how to build a business.”

Luzuriaga, a Cal Poly engineering student, learned how to turn her innovation into a viable product and successful company.

“It couldn’t have been a better program for us, being a team of only engineers,” she said.

Since the Summer Accelerator, OdinXR has narrowed its focus. The startup is now providing students with disabilities who cannot attend classes on a daily basis with access to engineering labs. Luzuriaga is working with the Cal Poly Disability Resource Center (DRC) to implement its technology in classrooms, running a pilot lab to determine whether it is beneficial to students.

“To be honest, when I first saw our demo, I cried,” Luzuriaga said. “It is a very, very rewarding experience to see something you’ve worked on for almost two years of your life, that just started as an idea — to finally see it happen.”

 

S2 Monitoring Solutions

S2 Monitoring Solutions spent their time in the Summer Accelerator developing technology to provide residential solar panel owners with analytics on their panels’ performance in order to maximize efficiency.

The startup was founded by a team of recent Cal Poly engineering graduates, Russell Calentena, Paul Romano and Fernando Estevez.

S2 Monitoring Solutions was “constantly changing” throughout the course of the Accelerator, according to Estevez. They entered the Accelerator with the intention of building a robot, but their mentors suggested they focus on software rather than hardware. 

Calentena and Romano began full-time engineering jobs in the weeks leading up to Demo Day, which also led to changes within their startup. 

S2 Monitoring Solutions originally intended for Calentena to present at Demo Day, but due to a scheduling conflict with his full-time position, they made a last-minute decision for Estevez to present instead.

“It was nerve-wracking, but it was a learning experience for me — no matter what, be prepared,” Estevez said. “And I did feel nervous, but I knew the pitch and I didn’t choke.”

While they are no longer working on S2 Monitoring Solutions, each co-founder said they left the Accelerator having learned several valuable lessons.

“My biggest takeaway was this idea of customer obsession,” said Calentena, who now works as a hardware development engineer at Amazon. “Whether it be with S2 Monitoring Solutions or with our respective jobs, it always starts with why we’re doing it.”

 

TractorCloud

TractorCloud entered the Summer Accelerator on a mission to help farmers maintain their equipment by developing a hardware-software device intended to monitor the predictive maintenance of farm equipment. 

The Summer Accelerator showed TractorCloud co-founder and Cal Poly engineering student Morgan Swanson that an innovative product is not the only aspect of a successful business.

“I’m an engineer, so at the beginning of the Accelerator, I had one engineering problem,” Swanson said. “At the end of the Accelerator, I had 50 business problems.”

Since the Accelerator, Swanson has been working to solve these problems — and he’s been relatively successful.

“Those 50 problems are now down to, like, 12,” he joked.

TractorCloud is currently waiting to receive their hardware prototypes, which are in the process of being shipped to the United States. Once the prototypes arrive, they will be deployed on select farms.

“It’s been over two years since we started the first prototype, so it’s really exciting to finally have something that can be considered a shippable product,” Swanson said.

TractorCloud plans to continue working on the software components of their product, as well as continue to raise funding for the startup.

 

Zoetic Motion

Zoetic Motion started the Summer Accelerator as Muscle Ninja, a startup developing wearable injury-prevention technology.

About one month before Demo Day, the startup underwent a massive pivot and began developing a comprehensive physical therapy support platform intended to keep patients engaged and on-track in their recovery.

The Accelerator helped Zoetic Motion navigate this pivot, co-founder Ivet Avalos said.

“Sometimes you need an outside perspective to make sure you’re going down the right path,” Avalos said. “That’s how that transition happened.”

Mentors suggested the Zoetic Motion co-founders improve their original revenue model, which prompted the pivot. The pivot also provided an opportunity for the founders to create a startup that “better aligned with [their] passions and personal interests,” Avalos said.

Zoetic Motion is now continuing to build their startup, working with the CIE Incubator to fast-track their progress. Their current priorities are customer development and product development, according to Avalos.

Avalos works primarily on Zoetic Motion’s business development — a role she would not have predicted for herself when she graduated from Cal Poly in 2021 with a mechanical engineering degree.

“I knew I wanted to do business someday, but I’m an engineer, so I didn’t even know where to start,” Avalos said. “The Accelerator was more than just a start. Now I’m 10 steps ahead and can hit the floor running.”

 

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It’s now been almost nine months since these nine teams have completed the Summer Accelerator program — but in less than two months, a new cohort will set out on their own startup ventures.

Meet the 2022 Summer Accelerator teams at this year’s May Entrepreneurship Forum, May 16 at 4:30 p.m. in the Cal Poly Performing Arts Center. Tickets are now available.

Here at the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE), we do a lot of work with teams and companies to help get their venture off the ground. This work includes on-campus programming in The Hatchery, the Summer Accelerator and the two-year Incubator. The cornerstone to all of our programs is mentorship.

We have over 140 mentors working with the CIE who bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to all of our teams and companies. The CIE mentor program includes entrepreneurs from high tech, venture capital, big retail, niche products and more. From San Luis Obispo, Bay Area, Los Angeles and out of state, we have mentors who provide guidance for multiple business types and help young entrepreneurs build, grow and sustain their businesses.

During the past Summer Accelerator, we had over 30 mentors come through the building to host workshops, meet with teams’ one-on-one and lead round table discussions. In addition to this, each of the eight teams had a Lead Mentor who met with them every week as they set milestones, worked through issues and grew their business.

Our amazing mentors make it possible for the CIE to provide a wide range of resources to teams and companies. We are so grateful for all of the time each mentor has given to the program, and look forward to the future!

If you, or someone you know is interested in mentorship, please fill out an application here.