New Startup Award Program Advances Student Entrepreneurship

Resources and opportunities for UT Dallas students to turn their entrepreneurship ideas into reality are growing, thanks to the Draper Foundation. In addition to supporting a new Startup Founders Award program, the foundation is sponsoring the Draper Pitch Competition, formerly the Big Idea Competition. The finals will be held April 14. (2024 file photo)

Innovation and entrepreneurship programs at The University of Texas at Dallas have launched a new $5,000 Startup Founders Award to accelerate student entrepreneurship, thanks to the generosity of the Draper Foundation.

Student startup companies from all UT Dallas schools can apply each semester for a Startup Founders Award as long as they are connected to the Naveen Jindal School of Management’s innovation and entrepreneurship programs. The inaugural cohort features 10 companies — six founded by undergraduates and four by graduate students.

Structured Path for Student Founders

Michelle Jones, director of the innovation and entrepreneurship programs, said students in every major have ideas that deserve to be heard, so the Startup Founders Award was created with this in mind.

“We built a structured, supportive pathway for students who are ready to move from ‘I have an idea’ to ‘I’m building a real venture,’” she said. “We have created both the motivation and the financial incentive students need to take action while they’re learning.”

Jones said the award program surrounds recipients with other company founders and provides the structure, funding and accountability they need to make progress.

Students participate in a weekly three‑hour workshop, complete venture assignments, join cohort accountability sessions and work directly with an assigned industry mentor who provides both guidance and encouragement. Students can earn up to $5,000 in a single semester by meeting critical venture milestones. They may reapply in subsequent semesters based on their progress.

“What excites us most about this first cohort is the energy, diversity of ideas and their desire to learn about the business side of innovation,” Jones said. “They’re not just dreaming; they’re getting rewarded for taking action.”

From Idea to Impact

Sindhura Anumolu, a management science graduate student, won a Startup Founders Award for HelioOps, a mobile-first, artificial intelligence (AI) platform that helps midsize hospitals — 150 to 500 beds — maximize bed capacity without construction. She said her experience while working in sales operations at Cisco and Dell inspired her business idea.

“I saw firsthand how data-driven decisions transform business outcomes,” she said. “When I started researching hospital bed capacity for a class project, I realized the same operational intelligence that works in enterprise tech was completely absent in health care. The award gave me the runway to move from research to reality.”

Anumolu said that the U.S. faces a 152,000-bed shortage in the next few years and that HelioOps can help solve it by unlocking hidden capacity already inside every hospital.

“Working on HelioOps taught me that the best solutions sit at the intersection of domain expertise, technology and human behavior — and that’s exactly where I want to build my career,” she said. “My advice to future students: Don’t wait until graduation to start. Use every course, every project, every professor as fuel for your idea.”

Narasimha Sainikhil Marisetty, a computer science senior in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, won a Startup Founders Award for CoachVision.ai, a virtual AI coach that helps beginners and athletes improve their sports skills by using just their phone camera.

“This award is a game changer. High-quality sports datasets for training AI models are incredibly rare and expensive. This funding allows us to bridge that gap, move past the idea phase and actually build our initial product,” he said.

Computer science coursework in the Jonsson School provided the technical foundation he needed to understand the “how” of the product. Simultaneously, a Jindal School course he is taking helped him understand the “why” behind the product.

“It is helping me navigate the business side and understand how startups are valued and scaled,” he said. “Outside the classroom, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the sheer density of the Dallas startup ecosystem. The amount of support and the number of accelerator programs available here make it a fantastic place to be a founder.”

Jones said students who thrive in the award program possess determination, willingness to receive and give feedback, swift decision-making, and perseverance even when things get rough.

“And they will get rough,” she said. “That’s the nature of entrepreneurship. I expect future applicants will be inspired by the funding, but more importantly, the possibility for significant progress for themselves.”