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MAJOR UPCOMING EVENTS &
ANNOUNCEMENTS!
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Apply to the Gebhardt Sandbox Fund by February 20!
Calling all current CMU undergraduate and graduate students! Apply to the Gebhardt Sandbox Fund to receive a $1K grant towards your startup!
Email questions to apetkov@andrew.cmu.edu.
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| CMU Lab to Market - Spring 2026 - San Francisco!
Wednesday, February 11, 2026
Come and hear from Carnegie Mellon University's top research spin-off companies at the third Lab to Market event with a keynote fireside chat featuring Aravind Srinivas, Co-founder, President & CEO, Perplexity and Sameer Gandhi, Partner, Accel.
This invite-only event is for deep tech investors and founders.
To request an invite, email Melanie Simko or Namrata Banerjee.
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| Are you a CMU alumni working on a startup? Apply to the CMU VentureBridge 2026 accelerator in Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and New York for funding, 1:1 support, founder roundtables, weekly talks with VCs and introductions to mentors and advisors.
Learn more and apply for funding here for the 2026 cycle. Feel free to attend the next info session on March 6th to hear from the team directly.
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CMU Startup Vinyl Launches on the App Store!
Carnegie Mellon ECE sophomores and Vinyl founders Vir Toolsidass and Yuvvan Talreja have announced that their startup is now live on the App Store.
While walking around campus, Vir and Yuvvan realized the amount of time people spend each day listening, yet most audio content is passive and inefficient. Deciding to come up with a better way to listen on-the-go, they built Vinyl, an audio platform that allows users to listen to their curiosities through short, podcast-style audio tailored to their interests.
Vinyl launched in mid-January and is already being used by 250+ early adopters.
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Pittsburgh Startups Raise $1.48B in VC in 2025 as
AI Deals Dominate the Market
Pittsburgh’s venture capital landscape finished strong in 2025, with local startups raising more than a billion dollars combined. Companies secured $279.8M across 24 deals in Q4, according to the latest Venture Monitor report from PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association. A majority of the top 10 deals came from companies that rely on AI for their innovations, with several in Series B or later, such as CMU startup BlastPoint, co-founded by CMU alumni Alison Alvarez, CEO and Tomer Borenstein, CTO, which uses AI-powered tools to make data-driven customer insights accessible, raised $14.2M and many more from CMU.
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Meet RapidEye: AI-Powered Property Inspections for
Short-Term Rentals!
CMU students Rohan and Sam are building RapidEye, an AI-powered property inspection tool aimed at helping short-term rental owners and property managers with peace of mind that their properties are well taken care of, without needing to physically visit.
Here's how it works: Cleaners record guided video walkthroughs on their phone. The AI automatically detects damages, verifies cleaning tasks and flags issues. RapidEye is currently deployed on 750+ properties and support integrations with major PMS systems.
If you're involved with property management, own short-term rentals or work in real estate, Rohan and Sam would love to talk to you. Email Rohan@rapideyeinspections.com, schedule a call via the website.
or schedule a 15 minute meeting.
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Join uea.x!
Explore. Experiment. Execute.
Building for fun? Want to use it to land your dream internship? Want to turn it into a startup? Join uea.x, an initiative to support builders at CMU through mentorship, funding and community. You'll receive:
• 1-on-1 Mentorship from anyone on our list below! Our mentors specialize in a variety of industries — find the right person for project or career advice. Our mentors range from YC-founders who raised millions in funding to CMU alums working at Google, Microsoft, BCG, Tesla, Palantir, NASA, and more.
• UEA Funding to grow your idea
• Bi-weekly speaker events featuring people who successfully turned their passion project into startups or tailored their projects to land their dream internship/job.
• Community of builders for support (and free food during build sessions!)
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Coming up on Saturday!
Venture Capital Investment Competition (VCIC)
Are you about to raise a round for your startup? CMU's Scottie Ventures is hosting the VCIC Regional Finals on Saturday, January 31, 2026. VCIC is an investment competition where undergraduate students from various universities compete and practice their VC startup evaluation skills. Startup founders get an opportunity to practice pitching, practice mock DD sessions with VCs and receive feedback. Students also perform detailed DD/research on the startup a few days before the competition, simulating DD that a real VC would do! This is a great opportunity to practice VC interactions and receive feedback.
Contact jiyag@andrew.cmu.edu if you are interested!
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CMU's ScottyLabs presents: Tartan Hacks | Feb 6-7!
TartanHacks is an 24-hour, in-person hackathon taking place at CMU on February 6-7, 2026. The event is a great opportunity to use your skills on real world projects and impress recruiters who are scouting for intern and full-time technology roles. There will be a keynote talk from the creator of Mathematica, Stephen Wolfram and top-placing projects will win thousands of dollars!
Sponsors include: AppLovin, Optiver, Accenture, Sandia National Laboratories, Visa and Jane Street.
Travel reimbursements will be provided to select, accepted participants who apply before the Priority Deadline of January 17, 2026. The National Deadline is January 31, 2026.
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Date: Saturday, January 31, 2026
This summit is the cornerstone event for understanding today’s real estate market, locally in Pittsburgh and across major markets nationwide. This year, we’re bringing together 14 speakers from around the country and 200+ attendees, including real estate professionals, graduate students, faculty and CMU alumni.
Open to all Carnegie Mellon students and real estate professionals!
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Join HAX Ventures and the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship for an exclusive summit connecting founders, investors, and defense innovation leaders at the forefront of dual-use technology. This half-day summit brings together the defense innovation ecosystem—from government program managers to startup founders to academic researchers—for candid conversations about commercializing
dual-use technologies.
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Search, Buy, Build: Entrepreneurship Through
Acquisition (ETA) Seminar
Date: Saturday, March 14, 2026
Location: Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship, Tepper School of Business, 4765 Forbes Avenue, 3rd Floor
Join us for this curated and practical intensive for professionals ready to acquire and operate their own business. This seminar is built for anyone interested in learning how to acquire and run a small business. You will accelerate your path into ETA through panel conversations with experienced acquirers, investors and acquisition experts.
Led by Chris Cynkar and Len Caric, the audience will learn the key phases of the acquisition process and hear about searchers’ real-world experiences, get advice from experts in the field and engage in candid discussions about key acquisition topics.
For questions, reach out to Timothy Watts at timothy.watts@scottiefetch.com.
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STARTUP JOB OPPORTUNITIES
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Design at Beacon Social, a Social App startup
that makes it easier to hang out with your friends!
Beacon is a social app that makes it easier to hang out with your friends. We connect people where they are and show them where they want to be, with fine-tuned customization, visibility, sharing, and community management settings.
We are hiring Short-Term Freelance Design Engineers. This person will own the transitions, micro-interactions, and design polish to achieve a premium feel within our core journeys and user flows.
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Build at Coral, a Startup
at the Intersection of Climate and Fintech!
Coral is a startup at the intersection of climate and fintech that makes sustainable building upgrades like heat pumps, batteries, and EV chargers more affordable and accessible. Our mission is to accelerate the electrification of the built environment through innovative financing solutions.
We’re seeking a full-stack engineer to join our team, building products and features to increase sales of energy-efficient solutions. This role is based in our NYC office (hybrid) and we’re open to leveling, Senior to Principal.
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Apply by Saturday, January 31, 2026!
Hosted and organized by the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship, which is Rice University's internationally-recognized initiative devoted to the support of entrepreneurship, and Rice Business, the Rice Business Plan Competition offers an educational program mirroring real-world experience through this multi-day event for student startups from across the world.
Student founders pitch to investors, receive feedback and advance their startup.
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Apply to the NSF I-Corps Program by February 2!
De-Risk Your Discovery: Transform Lab Breakthroughs into Market-Ready Ventures through NSF I-Corps!
The next CMU NSF I-Corps Regional program will be held virtually on the following Fridays from 9am-12pm: February 20, February 27 and March 13, 2026. This program is an intensive, experiential training designed to help academic researchers explore the commercial potential of their deep-tech innovations. The deadline to complete the required prep course and apply is February 2, 2026.
To learn more about the program and the application process, contact Melanie Simko.
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| CONNECTS/START SMART LEGAL SEMINARS
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| Can't make a CONNECTS? Watch on our YouTube channel.
See the full schedule and register for ALL of the seminars here!
The CONNECTS Seminars will resume in the Fall 2026 semester.
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**SPRING 2026 START SMART LEGAL SERIES (Virtual)**
ALL virtual sessions held at 5-6:15 PM | ET
Tuesday, January 27
The Worst Mistakes Made By Startups
February 10
Building Your Team
February 24
Starting a Business with an F-1 Student Visa
March 24 & April 7
How to Structure Your Capital Raise | Part 2 Workshop
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CMU ENTREPRENEURSHIP CLUBS
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| Click the images to find out more about each of the Clubs!
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| The CMU T&E has a jobs board, available for people across the community to share and seek new opportunities in the startup and entrepreneurship ecosystem. Find out more and visit the website here.
The CMU Tech & Entrepreneurship group aims to build a bridge between CMU students and alumni across the startup and tech continuum. With main chapters in NYC, Pittsburgh, and SF, we offer a range of in-person and online events and programming in the form of panels, workshops, founder/investor engagements, startup support, and socials to foster collaboration, innovation, and networking opportunities.
Join 7,000+ Tartans on our Slack workspace and mailing list for resources and updates on how you can engage in the community and CMU entrepreneurial ecosystem.
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The following companies help directly support our programming and entrepreneurs.
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| Pillsbury and Steptoe & Johnson, PLLC are holding office hours for the CMU Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship. The office hours are for any interested CMU graduate, undergraduate or alumni interested in entrepreneurship or connecting with members of the Swartz Center network.
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Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP
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Legal Services Weekly Virtual Office Hours with Matt Kirmayer
Mondays 1:00-3:00 PM ET (10-12 PT)
Matt Kirmayer of Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP, is offering office hours for newly established startup and emerging companies. Matt specializes in representing technology startups and emerging growth companies, assisting with entity formation, fundraising and overall growth needs. Startup companies with a founder who is a CMU graduate, undergraduate or alumni is eligible to register for
an appointment. Complete the Signup Form for a 30 minute session by the Thursday prior to your
desired appointment.
Contact Daria Stokes or Sean Mawhinney for office hours outside of these regular hours.
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Steptoe & Johnson PLLC
Steptoe & Johnson PLLC is a multi-jurisdictional, full-service law firm that takes a progressive approach to providing counsel at each stage of a client’s life cycle. Our dedicated team works closely with our clients to form entities, advise on the most advantageous entity type, and design and negotiate joint ventures and mergers and acquisitions. If a client has a dispute, Steptoe & Johnson has a team of business and product liability litigators and labor and employment lawyers to guide clients through these often stressful and disruptive situations.
Steptoe & Johnson brings a strong skillset for data privacy, cyber security and intellectual property matters which are frequent concerns for startups and technology companies. We offer competitive and flexible rates and aim to provide value to our clients.
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| HOW TO WORK OUT OF THE SWARTZ CENTER
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Swartz Center Education and Resources
No matter what phase of the entrepreneurship cycle you're in, there are programs and resources at the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship that will take your idea to the next level.
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COMMUNITY OPPORTUNITIES/RESOURCES
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FIND OUT WHAT OUR PARTNERS ARE DOING
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Have startup news or opportunities to share? Have questions about the Swartz Center Weekly Bulletin? Send news, opportunities or questions to Sonya Ford, Program Manager.
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Carnegie Mellon University Swartz Center For Entrepreneurship
5000 Forbes Avenue | Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890 |
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