Eight Weeks of Building, Learning, and Growing
In early June, 2026, 30 undergraduate students from across the nation arrived at Startup Summer as strangers. In mid-August, they took center stage as teams of entrepreneurs and co-founders, pitching companies they had built from the ground up. The night was a celebration of their hard work and an opportunity for the Silicon Flatirons community to see the next generation of entrepreneurs in action.
Many of the students are continuing to build their companies after the conclusion of the program, putting the knowledge and networks they developed this summer to work as they move forward.
Learning from the Front Range Startup Community
The Startup Summer Program provides students hands-on experience with what it actually takes to start a business. Students don’t just learn about entrepreneurship, they embark on the process of building a company firsthand.
Throughout the summer, students participated in sessions covering the skills founders need to launch and grow a company, including networking, how to pitch, effective teamwork, customer discovery, ethics, prototyping, legal considerations, and fundraising.
At each session, students learned from experienced founders, investors, lawyers, and other experts who brought their real-world experiences into the classroom. They also engaged with a broad network of mentors, who helped them work through challenges as they applied the lessons they learned each week.
“Mentoring with Startup Summer was an excellent reminder of how strong entrepreneurship is at CU Boulder. In a matter of weeks these students found real problems and built novel solutions. They also developed the skills to create and deliver an engaging pitch, which is not as easy as they made it look. It was awesome to see how far they came in such a short period of time and I can’t wait to see where they go from here.” — Brian Seckel, Program Manager at Techstars and Startup Summer Mentor
Students dedicated more than 40 hours to learning and mentor sessions alone. Many balanced the program alongside full-time jobs, internships, and classes, making their commitment to Startup Summer all the more impressive.
Tackling Real-World Problems
The diversity of this year’s companies reflects the range of problems that entrepreneurs can tackle:
Flocked and TutorRush focused on education. Flocked is an online marketplace connecting students with instructors through live classes, while TutorRush matches students with peer tutors based on subject, price, and schedule.
In healthcare, Clara helps medical-device companies reduce repair costs caused by hospital damage, while Pinnacle provides a remote care layer for the home that can flag potential medication issues and connect trained specialists to people who may need support.
Wayfound tackled the challenges of group travel with an all-in-one platform where users can collaborate on destinations, activities, accommodations, and itineraries.
In software and AI, Baseline helps engineering leaders understand how AI is affecting the way software is built, including which parts of the code come from AI and which come from developers.
Finally, Gift Hive brought personalization to gift shopping, generating gift ideas based on a recipient’s preferences and creating a personalized profile to guide recommendations.
Pitch Night: Bringing it all Together
The annual Pitch Night Competition gave each team the opportunity to put what they learned this summer to the test. In just a few minutes, students had to communicate the problem they were solving, explain their solution, and make the case for why their company could become a successful venture.
Judges Jaclyn Hester, General Partner at Foundry VC, and Jim Pollock, CEO & Co-Founder at LumenAstra Inc., evaluated the teams’ pitches in front of a packed audience of Silicon Flatirons supporters and community members. Students also competed for $15,000 in cash prizes, made possible through the generous support of Nancy Pierce. With two of her children having participated in the Startup Summer program, Nancy has seen firsthand the impact this experience can have on the next generation of entrepreneurs. We are incredibly grateful for her continued support and investment in these talented young innovators.
After careful deliberation the judges revealed the final results:
1st Place
| Clara Helping combat medical device damage |
|---|
| Jackie Auerbach |
| Janie Brockenbrough |
| Elleana Mestek |
| Shrim Patel |
2nd Place
| Pinnacle Remote care layer for families and their loved ones |
|---|
| Brook Dagne |
| Lincoln Jessen |
| Abe Menjívar |
| Adonay Mezgebe |
| Prithvikiran Premkumar |
3rd Place
| Wayfound All-in-one group trip planning tool |
|---|
| Andrew Elliott |
| Olivia Machart |
| Dominic Shuyler |
| Rodas Tewelde |
Audience Choice Award
| Gift Hive Local gift-discovery app |
|---|
| Cecil Carroll |
| Jasper Ooms |
| Kourtney Rathke |
| Margaret Stapleton |
| Esteban Vega |
4th Place Tie (in alphabetical order)
| Baseline Understanding the impact of AI in software development | Flocked Online marketplace for virtual classes | TutorRush On-demand tutoring platform |
|---|---|---|
| Aryan Choudhary | Sania Joshi | Sierra Crawford |
| Aditya Dhar | Kyle Lin | Diyora Daminova |
| Ivan Gorodinski | Shree Vegesna | Riya Kakkar |
| Matthew Mammarappallil | Cooper Wathen | |
| Om Mathur |
“We could have just learned how to build businesses this summer. But Startup Summer had a much more refined lesson: how to build with people. We learned how to find the right team before the right idea. Mentors were a part of every experience instead of an occasional resource. We were taught that team culture is one of the most valuable investments a company can make. Startup Summer gave us all the practical tools to build a business and then it gave us a belief in the very thing that makes startups last: the people who build them.” — Jaclyn Auerbach, Student Participant, Co-Founder of Clara
View the Startup Summer 2026 Pitch Night Photo Gallery
What Comes Next
Startup Summer is ultimately about giving students the opportunity to try entrepreneurship for themselves. Whether these seven companies continue to grow, evolve into something different, or simply become the first ventures in much longer entrepreneurial journeys, the students leave with something valuable: the confidence to launch a startup.
Learn more about the annual Startup Summer Program.