Two new student-run software ventures, Pensieve and Civitas, have been awarded 2025 Singhal Family Entrepreneurship Awards.
A collaboration between the Department of Computer Science and the Pava Maria LaPere Center for Entrepreneurship, the annual Singhal Family Entrepreneurship Awards were established to help jumpstart student-run ventures in the fast-growing, highly competitive software industry. In addition to $10,000 in funding, awardee teams are paired with a software mentor to assist in product development and have access to business, marketing, and financial mentorship through the Pava Center.
Meet the Teams
The Pensieve Team: Alan Li (Engr ’26), Jonathan He (Engr ’26), Ethan Lee (Engr ’27), and Jonathan He (Engr ’27).
Pensieve puts users’ data to work safely, privately, and across every AI tool they use for the ultimate personalized AI experience. Developed by four CS majors—Jonathan He (Engr ’26), Alan Li (Engr ’26), Jonathan He (Engr ’27), and Ethan Lee (Engr ’27)—the shared memory platform optimizes a seamless multi-agent workflow, allowing different AI agents to deliver more personalized, consistent, and uniquely tailored interactions to their users.
“Our Singhal Family Entrepreneurship Award will be instrumental in helping us launch Pensieve faster, scale our infrastructure for early users, and deliver a tool that’s secure, high-quality, and genuinely useful,” the team says.
Currently, the students are preparing to batch-launch Pensieve to a select group of local startups for beta testing. They welcome any local founders and developers interested in integrating a more personalized, intelligent AI into their existing product or startup to reach out at dev@pensieve.site or via LinkedIn.
Benjamin Wen, Engr ’27
Benjamin Wen, a third-year CS major, began building his government technology startup Civitas late last year after pondering the efficiency gains that AI could provide to highly manual government systems. After building a demo and showing his product to over 20 municipal, state, and federal agencies, he realized that existing inefficiencies are engrained by both government culture and policy, leading him to pivot to explore new AI products.
“The Singhal Family Entrepreneurship Award is exactly the jumpstart an aspiring founder needs,” Wen says. “It allows me to have faster feedback cycles from potential customers by covering application programming interface and tooling costs, giving me more time to build prototypes.”
Using the funding afforded by his award, Wen is now working on using AI computer-use agents—AI agents that can control a computer’s keyboard and mouse to perform tasks like a human user would—to connect and automate legacy software in logistics, administrative offices, and enterprise management.