In our most recent cohort, we accelerated 15 companies in industries spanning fintech, edtech, healthcare, and more over the course of eight weeks. Envision family, please join us in welcoming the founders of EC4.

A Little Louder

A Little Louder is a media and wellness company empowering young women of color to live boldly and exist joyfully.

Oyinkansola Sofela, She/Her

Oyinkansola is a community-builder, storyteller, and social entrepreneur. As a result of her upbringing in Lagos, Nigeria, she has always been passionate about developing adequate solutions to bridging gender, racial, and economic disparity gaps. She graduated Magna Cum Laude from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania where she concentrated in Marketing and Entrepreneurship & Innovation. While at Wharton, she gained professional experience as an Investment Management Summer Analyst at Goldman Sachs and an Associate Consultant Intern at Bain & Company. Building on her work in promoting an inclusive environment on campus, she founded A Little Louder Co., a media and wellness company empowering women of color to live boldly and exist joyfully.

AppBuddy

AppBuddy is democratizing access to higher education through peer-to-peer interactions.

Alisha Nanji (she/her), Natasha Nanji (she/her)

​​Born and raised in Toronto, Alisha and Natasha Nanji are twin sisters who graduated from Cornell University and are currently DMD candidates at Harvard School of Dental Medicine. As the cofounders of AppBuddy and having worked at a healthcare startup, Alisha and Natasha are passionate about creating social impact through entrepreneurship and innovation. They are the founders of CURBx, a semi-annual conference hosted at Cornell University for students to present research and innovative solutions. To date, CURBx has reached thousands of students. They also previously co-founded and managed a nonprofit for five years, which focused on combating senior neglect and loneliness. Alisha and Natasha use their social media platforms, which have grown a following of 16,000 individuals from across the world, to empower and mentor young, underrepresented students pursuing careers in STEM.

Athlytic

Athlytic is a fully-integrated marketplace that connects student athlete influencers with brands for endorsement opportunities.

Ashton Keys

Ashton Keys is a Detroit native and an Experience Architecture graduate from Michigan State University. He is an established professional in technology with experience working in UX design, engineering, product management, and growth marketing. He has held three prestigious entrepreneurship fellowships with Invest Detroit Ventures, Venture for America, and Visible Hands. He has a background in building digital marketplaces, where he most recently worked as a Product Manager at Rocket Homes, helping to launch their mobile app experience. Ashton is passionate about sports and technology. While establishing his company, Athlytic, Ashton was at the forefront of the NCAA’s name, image, and likeness ruling.

Carpemed

Carpemed is the second opinion & telehealth platform for the underdoctored.

Olaseni Bello (he/him)

Olaseni Bello holds an MBA from UC Berkeley Haas MBA and a Juris Doctor from Vermont Law School. He is a New York licensed attorney, Former Army Captain, and JAG Officer. He was previously a Vice President on Morgan Stanley’s Fixed Income trading floor in NY and Senior Counsel in the Capital Markets for Wells Fargo. He launched CarpeMed during business school in 2019 while working at Google.

Stealth Company

Democratizing access to health management for people with chronic illness.

David Morales (he/him)

At 15, David cold-emailed his way to a High-Performance Computing internship at his local university. Since then he’s led in product, operational, & growth roles at a variety of early startups and late-stage companies: from designing a novel diagnostic for infectious disease (including SARS-CoV-2) alongside Logan Collins (inventor of antimicrobial protein, OpaL & one of the youngest scientists to be recognized at the Nobel prize ceremony) to building infrastructure using Internet of Things & Artificial Intelligence for a private game reserve in South Africa. At his core, David is looking to help others by creating value in their lives.

Quest DAO

Helping Creators and Brands build Crypto-Economies.

Debparna Pratiher(She/Her), Shubham Nigam(He/Him)

Shubham and Debparna are a team of builders and hustlers who come from immigrant backgrounds with experience working at big tech companies such as Nvidia, Amazon, Tesla, Linkedin, and more. They have had the privilege of going to great schools and being a part of renowned fellowships such as Contrary and Kleiner Perkins Engineering Fellowship.

Impact

Impact is the digital destination for young people shaping the future. (instagram.com/impact)

Tim Chau (they/them), Joelene Latief (she/her), Michelle Andrews (she/her)

Tim (top) is the founder + CEO of Impact, the digital destination for young people shaping the future. They’ve grown to 1.9M followers on Instagram in 1.5 years and reach 10M people monthly. Tim is queer, non-binary, and Asian American, and their intersecting identities fuel their work. They are from the Bay Area and transferred to UC Berkeley from Santa Monica College and Foothill College. Before Impact, they worked at a social media startup and started their own social media agency, Irrational Media. There, they grew and managed communities of millions of followers and provided services to brands like TikTok, MSCHF, and Netflix.

Istoria

Istoria is the next chapter in reading.

Elijah Maletz (he/him)

Elijah is a 2nd-year MBA student at Yale School of Management. He grew up in Hood River, Oregon in a house without a TV and has a deeply-instilled love of reading. After undergrad at Baylor, he completed a Fulbright ETA in Mongolia, then worked in several strategy, M&A, and sales roles at State Street Corporation, all in the digital finance space, in Boston and Hangzhou. He is fascinated with the potential of self-organizing communities, novel ownership structures, multi-sided platforms, and the creative potential of people.

Klorah

Klorah brings traditional job comforts to freelance workers.

Elvin Atwine (he/him)

Elvin is a high school student who loves to build (prev UX, Product @ Kaiya).

Sani

Sani is an apparel brand inspired by South Asian culture.

Ritika Shamdasani (she/her)

Ritika (left) is from Fayetteville, North Carolina. She is a junior at North Carolina State University where she studies fashion development and product management. She is the co-founder of Sani, an apparel brand inspired by South Asian culture. Ritika has spent summers working with Amazon, Kode with Klossy, and Girls Who Code. Talk to her about gaining notoriety on TikTok for bad pronunciation, why she thinks Chameleon cold brew concentrate is unparalleled and what to wear to an Indian wedding.

Niki Shamdasani (she/her)

Niki (right) came to Sani after starting her career consulting and working at a startup accelerator. She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a Morehead-Cain Scholar and then joined Deloitte’s federal consulting practice. Soon after, she came on as the Chief of Staff at Matter, a startup accelerator for early-stage media companies. After years spent supporting startups and exploring market needs, she left Matter and New York to start Sani with her younger sister Ritika. Niki was born and raised in Fayetteville, NC.

Torqlub

Torqlub is the marketplace for the world’s finest automobiles.

Maurice Gramata-Jones (he/him)

Maurice is the co-founder of Torqlub, “The Marketplace for the World’s Finest Automobiles.” Maurice graduated from the University of Southern California and is the first person in his family to pursue a career in startup development. He has worked at Trill Market (M13-backed startup) as the head of user development and PayPal as a Market Development Executive (his most recent role). As tumultuous as the journey’s been, Maurice is blessed to have made it this far and to continue building/scaling our venture to something that far expands our initial vision.

Steven Alexander Littaua (he/him)

Steven was born, raised, and still resides in Southern California. He is proud to have gone down a non-traditional education route by taking a gap year out of high school, attending a local community college, and then transferring to UCLA to finish out his bachelor’s degree. Steven has interned at a large tech company in Seattle and works as a Consultant Engineer for Cyborg Mobile, where he can put his values and beliefs in DEI towards the work he does daily.

Waape

Waape is Africa’s digital talent marketplace.

Collins Mbulakyalo (he/him) & Natasha Katondwaki

Collins was born and raised in Kampala, Uganda by a single mum and visiting father. Collins’ first job out of high school was working as a charcoal and potato hawker. He then worked as an IT Support Specialist which was a stepping stone for him to then finally venture into his dream career of Software Engineering. Collins received a Udacity scholarship and was connected to Andela. He learned how to code via Codecademy, working both day and night shifts at this then job to get internet access. All of his prior experiences have been key contributors to who he is today and has empowered him with the skills and resources to build Waape.

Stealth Company

Redefining healthcare for millions of the most vulnerable families.

Havi Nguyen

Havi studied computer science at Columbia University. Her storytelling and sales experience started when she was in college, only having 10 minutes to convince alumni to donate — teaching her the power of a single phone call. Havi combined her interests in technology with her passion for healthcare after experiencing first-hand how the healthcare system has failed her immigrant family.

She has held product roles at Atlassian and Facebook and was an investment partner at Dorm Room Fund, leading their female founder track. She then joined a stealth start-up in a product strategy and operations role for a healthcare company as their first hire, bringing life-changing care to children with autism. Now she’s taken the leap to start something of her own in healthcare.

Stealth Company

Unlocking real estate opportunities.

Leilla Chun (she/her)

Leilla grew up entrepreneurial and her first business was helping her classmates sell school supplies. Leilla started her career in tech helping people make financial progress at Credit Karma and spent lots of time thinking about ways people make a living and become financially free. She holds a B.A. from Colgate University and M.S. from Duke University.

At Envision, we’re building the best community, accelerator program, and built-in support system for young diverse founders. Subscribe to our newsletter, apply for our upcoming cohort, and follow us on Twitter.

Envision is a community-driven accelerator for young, underrepresented founders. We believe that high-potential founders should have nothing standing in their way to building great companies. Envision’s approach combines a non-dilutive grant, tailored workshops, 1:1 mentorship, and a community for life.

Meet Envision Cohort 4: Young, Diverse Founders Building the Future was originally published in Envision Accelerator on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Yale is a top-tier academic institution but it’s not a top-tier hub for tech entrepreneurship. We at the Yale Entrepreneurial Society are ready to change that.

Yale has the intellect, resources, and talent it needs to be an elite entrepreneurial ecosystem. The problem facing our campus isn’t one of resources or allocation, but a cultural one: we, as a collective, value a stable career in finance/consulting over the risk that comes with bringing something new into the world. With the YES Incubator, we’re on a mission to change that culture, for the better.

The YES Incubator is Yale’s premier community for students to ideate, build, and launch their own tech ventures. We help Yalies bring their ideas to life by empowering them with workshops, peer mentorship, and a community of like-minded individuals. The Incubator crescendos at the end of each semester with a Demo Day.

To sum it up, we’re about getting passionate people into the same room and watching the magic happen.

Our mission is three-fold:

1. Inspire the next generation. You can’t be what you’ve never seen. We inspire Yalies earlier in their careers, not only by telling them they can create impactful tech products but showing them those who have done it before. From day one, we want to ingrain the fact that they have the potential to create something that people want.
2. Create a culture of execution. Pursuing new ideas for the first time is hard- stagnation and the idea disease are contagious. Entrepreneurship is more about execution than it is ideation, so we help students get the ball rolling, and we’re fostering a culture where ideas don’t just stay ideas.
3. Establish a strong community of Yalie entrepreneurs. If inspiration is our acquisition strategy, then community is our retention plan. Building in a community > building alone. Entrepreneurship is about learning fast and iterating quickly. Through a community, we’re hoping to shorten learning curves, share different perspectives, and pay it forward.

So, what’s the big deal?

At the Yale Entrepreneurial Society, we are extremely tactical in our approach to community building. To foster this (counter-)culture unfamiliar to Yale, we’re focusing on Yalies early in their careers (’24s and ’25s) to create a flywheel effect that the entire campus will feel for years to come.

We’re investing heavily into our community. This not only means late night building and brainstorming sessions, but also working closely with each and every student to help them get over the hurdles of turning an idea into a reality.

We’re strong believers that you can’t be what you can’t see. So we’re leveraging successful Yalie student founders and recycling them back into the ecosystem.

The Vision:

Turn Yale into a top-tier hub for tech entrepreneurship. 🚀 We envision a startup ecosystem at Yale where everyone’s creating something new, everywhere you look. This starts with creating a counter-culture that embraces pursuing new ideas in their earliest stages.

Jonathan Pierre 🇭🇹 on Twitter: "Envisioning a startup ecosystem at Yale that resembles a mini tech hub.The right allocation of people who:* Believe in the future* Inclined to pursuing new ideas* Embrace a culture of paying it forward.It all starts with a paradigm shift / Twitter"

Envisioning a startup ecosystem at Yale that resembles a mini tech hub.The right allocation of people who:* Believe in the future* Inclined to pursuing new ideas* Embrace a culture of paying it forward.It all starts with a paradigm shift

If you’re someone who resonates with our mission (student or not) of putting Yale on the map as a hub for tech entrepreneurship, shoot me an email at jonathan.pierre@yale.edu or DM me on Twitter @jonathanpierree.

Learn more about the Incubator here.

Jonathan Pierre is a sophomore at Yale University studying Economics and Math. He is the Director & Founder of the YES Incubator, the premier community for Yalies to ideate, build, and launch a tech venture.

Founded in 1999, the Yale Entrepreneurial Society is a 501(c)3 non-profit dedicated to creating a new generation of Bulldog entrepreneurs. Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and of course, our very own Yale Journal of Innovative Ventures.

Why we’re launching YES Incubator was originally published in Yale Journal of Innovative Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.