B’More Designful and Eloquia, both startups founded by students from the Department of Computer Science, are among the Pava Marie LaPere Center for Entrepreneurship’s 2024 Social Innovation Lab (SIL) cohort, an accelerator that recognizes and empowers innovators in the Baltimore area.
Teams accepted to SIL receive access to a wide network of mentors, advisors, partners, and funders in Baltimore and beyond. Those who complete the experience are eligible for a $5,000 grant stipend and the opportunity to win a $15,000 cohort prize.
Weekly programming for the cohort began in January. For the next four months, participants will meet for curated workshops on topics including customer discovery, impact measurement and management, operational planning, and revenue modeling. Founders are also required to regularly participate in one-on-one meetings with assigned strategic advisers to assess their venture progress.
Meet the Teams
B’More Designful is a boutique design firm that specializes in UX design for early-stage software ventures. Motivated by his experiences working on software startups such as uCredit, co-founder and CS alum Sean Pak, Engr ’24 wanted to help other fledgling ventures create more “designful” products—software that is functional, useable, accessible, and appealing to customers and investors.
A regular participant in the Pava Center’s various programs and accelerators, Pak and his co-founder, Carolyn Tung, A&S ’24, applied to SIL to fulfill their mission of helping other early-stage ventures—especially those with founders from underrepresented populations—succeed.
Sean Pak, Engr ’24
“I’m a first-generation college student and the son of two immigrants, so I know what it’s like to not have the connections or resources that your peers do,” Pak says. “Starting a business is a whole new world. I was lucky to find mentors and advisors—and had the privilege of networking through the university—but there are people who don’t even have that.”
Pak cites his fluency in computer science as an advantage in creating design systems that match ventures’ tech stacks. He also credits the influence of Ali Madooei, an associate teaching professor of computer science and the faculty advisor of uCredit.
“Professor Madooei is really up to date with all the latest technologies and integrates them seamlessly into all of his classes,” Pak says. “Like in Full-Stack JavaScript, when ChatGPT was brand-new, he’d already integrated it into his curriculum—so I had already used it very early on. He’s really opened my eyes to the latest tech, which got me to explore even more outside of class and continue to keep ahead of the curve.”
Pak is currently working on automating some of B’More Designful’s systems using Make software integration, which he recommends to other businesses and even students for automating various aspects of their lives. He’s also looking forward to attending the accounting and marketing workshops facilitated by SIL.
Pak hopes his team’s participation in SIL will contribute to their goals of getting more of their clients into accelerators, helping them raise the funding they need, and servicing more Hopkins- and Baltimore-based startups. In the meantime, his advice for student entrepreneurs is to “just get started.”
“Starting is the hardest part. Because once you start, there’s really only two outcomes. I know this is very binary thinking, but in the simplest terms, you fail or you succeed,” he says. “And in failure, you learn a lot—so in your next venture, your likelihood to succeed drastically increases because you took those learnings with you. I don’t really see failure as a lost opportunity or wasted time because I’ve learned quite a lot from all my past experiences.
“One thing I learned in particular is that your dots connect in reverse,” Pak adds. “You learn something, and you might not know how it applies yet, but it will come up again in the future—the dots will connect.”
As a speech fluency platform, Eloquia’s mission is to transform speech therapy by making improvements in communication more visible, measurable, and achievable through data-driven insights.
Aditya Kondepudi
“As someone who stutters, I understand firsthand both the challenges of speech difficulties and the transformative power of speech therapy,” says founder Aditya Kondepudi, a third-year undergraduate double majoring in computer science and biomedical engineering. “I created Eloquia to complement and enhance the therapy experience while also making support tools more accessible to those with limited access to regular sessions. Our platform helps users maximize the value of every therapy interaction by providing continuous feedback and progress tracking, making the journey to improved communication more tangible and achievable for everyone.”
Joined by a group of fellow CS students, Kondepudi has been able to leverage his team’s expertise in machine learning and software development to create an intuitive platform that makes speech therapy progress tracking accessible and engaging while ensuring that the system is secure and scalable.
The team applied to SIL with the goal of maximizing their startup’s impact in the community, hoping to forge partnerships with Baltimore-based speech therapy clinics and expand the local populace’s access to speech therapy tools.
“We also want to refine our business model to ensure its sustainability and connect with mentors who can help guide our growth while still keeping social impact at the forefront,” Kondepudi says.
Kondepudi plans to take a gap year to work on Eloquia full-time before pursuing his PhD in bioinformatics and computational medicine.
His advice to CS entrepreneurs is simple: “If you have an idea, don’t hesitate to reach out and take full advantage of the resources available to you. The CS Department—and Hopkins as a whole—offers incredible resources for student entrepreneurs; there are numerous professors who are genuinely interested in helping students develop their ideas, and a wealth of programs and support systems available.
“The support network here is extensive and accessible,” he says. “You just need to take that first step and ask.”
Learn more about the 2024 SIL cohort here.