Ian Scheffler
To form a venture is, quite literally, to go on an adventure. The words have the same Latin root, meaning to head toward what is to come.
On Friday, a trio of Penn Engineering startups demonstrated their aptitude for navigating the unknown by taking home more than $100,000 at the annual Venture Lab Startup Challenge.
Building the Future of Caregiving
Sync Labs, whose AI assistant, Alice, is enhancing caregiving for seniors, claimed the Richard and Ellen Perlman Grand Prize, worth $50,000, as well as three other awards, each worth $10,000: The Jacobson Social Impact Prize, a Khan Family AI for Business Award and the Frederick H. Gloeckner Undergraduate Award.
Founded by Melanie Herbert (EE’25, GEN’26), the team also includes Alexandra Popescu (EE’25).
Nicholas McGill-Gardner, a lecturer in Electrical and Systems Engineering (ESE), advised the group during their journey through the ESE Senior Design course sequence, which is run by Jan Van der Spiegel, Professor in ESE, and Sid Deliwala, Alfred Moore Senior Fellow and ESE’s Director of Lab Programs. As part of that department-wide competition, Sync Lab won the Aditya Prakash Societal Impact Award.
In addition to Senior Design, Sync Labs also participated in VIP-X, Venture Lab’s three-month startup accelerator, guided by John Ondik (WG’94), and won the 2025 President’s Innovation Prize, for which they were advised by Jeffrey Babin, Professor of Practice and Associate Director of Penn Engineering Entrepreneurship (EENT).
Improving Distributed AI Computing
Quok.it, which helps customers leverage unused computing power around the world for tasks like AI training, earned the William G. Simpson and R. Drew Kistler Runner Up Prize, worth $25,000.
Co-founded by Ahmed Abdellah (ENG’25, GEE’26), Alexander Cho (ENG’25), Tarunyaa Sivakumar (EE’25, GEE’25) and Yiting Shen (ENG’25, GEN’26), the firm also earned a Khan Family AI for Business Award.
Benjamin Lee, Professor in ESE and in Computer and Information Science (CIS), and Joe Devietti, Associate Professor in CIS, served as Quok.it’s faculty advisors during the team’s journey through the same ESE Senior Design course sequence in which Sync Labs participated, and through which Quok.it won the Hon. Judge Harold Berger Award.
Like the founders of Sync Labs, the students behind Quok.it developed their startup, in part, in EAS 5490: Engineering Entrepreneurship (EENT) Lab, a course taught by Babin.
Securing Arborists’ Safety
And Serpent Labs, whose robotic tree trimmer is designed to safeguard arborists performing critical but dangerous tasks like cutting down trees near power lines, took home the Robert S. Blank New Venture Collaboration Award and the Weiss Audience Choice Award, each for $10,000.
Run by Margaret Zhu (W’26), Steyn Knollema (GEN’26), Jason Li (GEN’26) and Yiran Xuan (GEN’26), the startup is advised by Mark Yim, Asa Whitney Professor of Mechanical Engineering in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics and Director of the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Lab.
From Vision to Venture
Each team had five minutes to present their vision to a panel of five alumni judges, who then asked pointed questions about everything from go-to-market strategies to the assumptions underlying revenue projections.
The three firms emerged from an initial field of nearly 100 entrants, which two rounds of competition whittled down to eight finalists, representing the Perelman School of Medicine, Wharton, the Penn Graduate School of Education and Penn Engineering.
The finals took place in Tangen Hall, Penn’s home for entrepreneurship and innovation, in front of a live audience of dozens of staff, faculty, alumni, family members and friends.
Sponsored by alumni, the competition provides essential support for student startups — many of the teams have passed up job offers to continue working on their startups after graduation.
To learn more about Penn Engineering Entrepreneurship (EENT), please visit the EENT website.
Alumni interested in participating as judges in future iterations of the Startup Challenge can sign up online, and contact Irina Yuen, Venture Lab’s Senior Director of Founder and Joiner Programs, at iyuen@wharton.upenn.edu with any questions.