Student Group Bets on the Orange Bubble

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Courtesy of Kyung Lee ’25

While interning at The Boring Company, a Texas-based tunnel construction firm founded by Elon Musk, in 2020, Louis Aaron ’23 encountered gINT (geotechnical integrator), the industry standard software application for storing geotechnical data — specifically, soil boring data that civil and structural engineers use to evaluate whether an area is safe for construction. The application hadn’t been updated since the 1980s, and it was a nightmare to open, let alone use. 

Aaron later created BoreDM, a clean, easy-to-use web application, to replace gINT. The application was originally meant for COS 333, Advanced Programming Techniques, in which students create a major piece of software as part of their final project. 

 “I started working on it during May of my junior year,” Aaron said, “because I was procrastinating for a final exam.” But his project ended up progressing faster than expected, and it could no longer wait for COS 333, which Aaron intended to take in the fall term of his senior year. Instead, he decided to turn his passion project into a business. “There was no going back,” he said. 

In his remaining time at Princeton, classmates occasionally provided feedback on the product design, his mentors in the geotechnical field taught him about the industry, and his roommate helped him come up with the company name: “Boring Data Management.” And, during a critical period in BoreDM’s development, Aaron received a grant from Prospect Student Ventures, Princeton’s first venture capital club.

Started in 2020, PSV is a nonprofit organization that supports student founders through grants ranging from $1,000 to $10,000. The group targets student founders specifically in the MVP (minimum viable product) stage, bridging the gap between ideas and action. 

PSV began when its three co-founders, Ayushi Sinha ’20, Tinashe Handina ’21, and Kelvin Yu ’23, realized that student startups at Princeton could benefit from more immediate access to funding. During her time as an undergraduate, Sinha founded WellPower, a company focused on bringing clean water and energy systems to communities in East Africa, with three other Princeton students, including Handina. While she ended up taking an offer from Microsoft before graduating, a part of her had always wondered, “If I had, like, $3,000 more, could I have done this full time?”

According to Sinha, “There’s this chasm before you’re ‘legit’ enough to ... be taken seriously by investors.” To get to that next level requires access to onset capital. Sinha also saw the dissonance between the amount of existing entrepreneurial ideas at Princeton and how many of them are actually realized. Many senior thesis projects or courses in the entrepreneurship curriculum through the Keller Center or the department of computer science involve creating a startup or making a product that has real-world applications. Students will discard their ideas if they can’t find a way to fund them, Sinha said, because of a lack of “connective tissue” between their academic projects and startup work.

In the fall of 2021, PSV funded PolyGone, a startup focused on reducing plastic pollution from aquatic environments and waterways through a microplastic filtering device called the “Plastic Hunter.” The project was born out of the thesis research of two graduate students in the department of architecture, Nathaniel Banks *21 and Yidian Liu *21. PSV’s grant was able to fund the continued development of their prototype for the Plastic Hunter, allowing them to arrive at a final minimum viable product. The two founders went on to receive follow-on funding in the spring of 2023 and were featured in the Forbes “30 under 30” list for social impact.  

For Aaron and BoreDM, $3,000 from their PSV grant went toward purchasing a license for an AG grid library that would be integrated into their application’s user interface. Without it, Aaron would have had to write hundreds of lines of code himself. “Three thousand dollars at the time was a really big investment for us, and it’s something that we might’ve hesitated to do otherwise, but PSV was able to fund that, and that is still our core grid library users spend 60% to 80% of their time in,” Aaron said. “PSV was really helpful because in those early days, every dollar counts.” 

Creating access to capital is only one side of PSV’s mission. During his gap year, Yu worked at a venture capital fund in San Francisco, and upon his return to Princeton he noticed the “lack in institutional resources to support student founders compared to other schools.” Through PSV, Yu wanted to bring “access to education in venture capital [by] connecting [student founders] with domain experts and real VCs.” The educational programs would allow students to hone their skills in sales pitching, product management, and marketing in ways that are scarcely available in a classroom setting. 

The club’s members are split into three teams: investments, venture partnerships, and events and programming.

As the managing director of the investments team, George Chiriac ’25 said that “a big part of [PSV’s] value is that it gives venture capital education to both its members and to ... its founders who are applying for grants. They go through the VC process, but at a smaller scale and with lower stakes. And then, they’re prepared to do actual fundraising because they know what questions will be asked [and] how it is to pitch your company.” 

Between his roles of sourcing funds from outside donors, reviewing applications, and running due diligence processes, Chiriac most enjoys the relationships he builds with student founders, getting to know their thought processes and witnessing their first steps in entrepreneurship. PSV’s tight knit community of around 40 members allows them to witness the meaningful impacts of their work. 

Besides investments, the venture partnerships team conducts pro bono research for venture capital firms and fosters close relationships to the world of venture capital beyond Princeton. The events and programming team coordinates fireside chats and speaker events to grow campus presence while occasionally collaborating with Princeton’s Entrepreneurship Club. Most recently, PSV hosted Jing Jing Chai, a partner at Taihill Ventures who came to speak about her experience investing in deep tech and how to turn research into a startup. PSV has also brought in legal experts to speak with students about topics such as forming a board, equity, and regulatory compliance. Other networking events have connected students to internships with major venture capital firms.

Yu prizes the growth that PSV has seen since its launch and believes that the evolving teams are “definitely taking it to new heights.” In the past four years, PSV has funded 18 companies, overseen two exits, and deployed over $80,000. Over the course of the summer, Chiriac and his team raise funds, aiming for a budget of $120,000 over the next three years, all of which will be given to student founders. Chiriac anticipates PSV’s continued popularity on campus as “over 100 students apply to the club each year.” 

Alex Tseng ’26, who started Watt-Our, an energy storage startup focused on creating virtual power plants (VPPs), relied on PSV’s resources to fortify his business model while also building up his entrepreneurial skills. Still in a nascent stage, Watt-Our has yet to produce a minimum viable product. The grant Tseng received from PSV in the spring went toward building a “hardware in the loop” simulation device that imitates complex algorithms in real-time. 

Tseng has always been interested in renewable energy solutions, but it was at Princeton that he started to develop his knowledge in power systems and energy infrastructure in particular. “Our generation’s … grand problem is going to be climate change,” he said. “One of the major components of reducing carbon emissions is going to be allowing the grid to get flexible in ways that we can electrify our society and reduce the need for oil and polluting forms of energy production.” 

Watt-Our targets a niche consumer base of individuals and communities that may be overlooked by the central grid system and faces big competition in the market for VPPs, an increasingly attractive product. As an early-stage startup, Watt-Our’s business model anticipates many adjustments as the company makes its first strides. 

The team still has a lot to develop on the software side, but a non-dilutive, “no-strings-attached” grant takes pressure off, according to Tseng. “This is definitely [a] time that I think is nice to slow down and to try to develop things correctly,” he said. “We’re not beholden to anybody.” 

For students at Princeton and other elite colleges, where career fairs are saturated with corporate recruiters, the pipeline into consulting, finance, and big tech may seem like a rite of passage. It can be difficult to convince students to start something of their own. “People don’t want to pursue entrepreneurship [because] it’s too risky,” Chiriac said. “There’s not enough culture for it.” Sinha hopes that PSV will encourage students so that they “don’t go work at Microsoft for the summer but they work on their startups.” 

If it wasn’t for BoreDM, Aaron said, he would have either ended up working at a tech company after graduating or taken a return offer at Boston Consulting Group following his junior summer internship. Now, Aaron runs BoreDM full-time. The application officially launched in January 2023 and is presently used by 12 state departments of transportation as well as geotechnical firms in the United States, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Canada, South America, and Australia.