Eight student ventures took the virtual stage for the 2026 Summer Launch Incubator showcase, capping six weeks of customer discovery, product launches, and in several cases, complete strategic pivots. Now in its 16th year, Georgetown Entrepreneurship’s premier student venture incubator paired each company with two mentors and a summer of expert sessions covering customer discovery, AI, business models, marketing, legal, financing, and pitching.
This year’s cohort built under a single organizing idea, articulated by longtime program leader Amy Millman: the business is the product. Founders, she noted, often fall in love with product ideation while overlooking the business structure needed to actually bring something to market. This summer, the program deliberately emphasized building that foundation, and the showcase made clear the lesson landed.
The cohort also spent the summer working out of the Leonsis Venture Lab, Georgetown’s early-stage incubator space, where students connected with resident alumni founders and, as lab director Opelo Matome noted, brought fresh energy into the community.
Validate Before You Build
If one lesson echoed across the showcase, it was that enthusiasm is not the same as validation. The strongest presentations came from founders willing to let evidence reshape their ideas.
Ambees, founded by David Xie (B‘29), entered the summer with an education and career exploration product built from the founders’ own experiences. “We thought that our background, our love for education means that if we have this problem, surely everyone has this problem,” David reflected. Validation calls told a different story: the product was a “cool to have,” not a must-have. The team pivoted to a B2B2C talent marketplace shaped by recruiter feedback, and David distilled the summer into a single directive for future founders: “You must validate before you build.” The team is now preparing to apply to Y Combinator’s winter batch, with David planning a move to the Bay Area.
Kashmir Saffron House founder Dipam Shah (MBA‘27) arrived convinced his challenge was simply launch and marketing. “I came into this program very product first, saying that I’m a brand, and I’m ready,” he said. More than 100 customer interviews and outreach to roughly 70 distributors later, he reached a sharper conclusion: his B2B saffron business and his D2C tea brand needed entirely different go-to-market paths. “What I learned is that I need to separate the two.” Saffron will move through distributor and food-service channels, while tea builds as a direct-to-consumer brand, a reminder that channel strategy matters as much as product quality.
MyStaq founder Tazeen Ajmal (MBA‘27) began the summer building a personalized supplement platform spanning recommendations, e-commerce, and tracking. Customer conversations revealed the real pain point sat elsewhere. “Buying supplements is easy. Knowing what to take and tracking if it actually works is the real problem,” she said. That insight led her to creating a health dashboard rather than e-commerce, a pivot in emphasis that reframed the entire business.
AI as an Equalizer
A defining theme of this year’s cohort was how AI expanded what student founders could accomplish. Georgetown provided the cohort with access to Claude, and mentor Ken Wake introduced an AI plugin he built for the Georgetown entrepreneurship community, grounded in Georgetown and Jesuit values, common founder questions from Chalk Talk sessions, and frameworks like The Mom Test. The tool supports founders from ideation through business-building, even flagging gaps such as insufficient customer research before a pitch. Wake noted the 2026 cohort advanced unusually quickly, crediting the founders themselves, the program team, and the new leverage AI provides.
No one embodied that leverage more than HomeTurfX founder Ellie Anderson (C‘29), a cross-country runner and art major who built a 360-degree course-visualization platform for runners despite having no coding or videography background. “I walked into our first meeting with a lofty goal of a complex filming and coding project across five native platforms,” she said. With support from mentors and Georgetown’s AI resources, she left with a working product, growing industry relationships, and a request list that includes NCAA coach introductions and sports-tech pitch competitions.
WADDL founder Dylan Chiodo (MBA’27) told a similar story. Using no-code and AI-enabled tools, he built and shipped an MVP for his verified custom apparel storefront platform, which lets identity-based groups sell branded merchandise without managing inventory or logistics. Framing the business around helping groups build connections “one T-shirt at a time”. Dylan used customer feedback to strip friction from his onboarding flow and grew from four to eight active stores over the summer.
The cohort also heard a note of caution. In his expert session reflection, attorney Alex Lawrence advised founders against using general AI tools to draft major contracts, pointing them instead toward specialized platforms and toward actual lawyers for first major customer contracts and early fundraising.
Building the Business Behind the Product
Several founders spent the summer proving the program’s theme most literally: the hard work was not the product, but the company around it.
Threshold founder Jenna Lebowitz (MBA‘27) built an AI-supported data cleaning and auditability platform, a technically complex problem she learned to make vivid through a fictional data consultant. “Joe doesn’t know what to trust,” she explained; with Threshold, “Joe decides once and that decision travels everywhere.” Over the summer she launched a live MVP with an ingestion pipeline, began a pilot, refined pricing, and identified a beachhead in multi-entity and portfolio-company operations, pairing technical sophistication with newfound clarity about positioning.
DogWater Studios founder Jeremy Matsumoto (MBA‘27), a military veteran and project manager, is building Imprint, a narrative-driven educational game designed to make learning the byproduct of fun. His summer transformed him from solo builder into studio leader: he hired interns, secured developer partnerships with Xbox, PlayStation, and Apple, and reached a sober strategic conclusion: self-publishing is far riskier than a publisher-backed path.
AVAC founder Fidel Gomez Torres (SCS‘27) runs a mission anyone can rally behind: connecting veterans to careers in the arts, culture, and creative economy. But his summer breakthrough was more organizational than inspirational. The biggest shift, he said, was learning to build “organizational capabilities” and “turn execution into infrastructure”, repeatable systems for recruitment, communication, impact measurement, and institutional partnerships. The proof came quickly: AVAC’s Library of Congress pilot served 16 participants, roughly double the expected 8 to 10. Next up is fundraising for a fellowship model.
A Cohort, Not Just a Class
Threaded through every presentation was the community that formed around the work. Founders credited mentors, entrepreneurs-in-residence, and (repeatedly) each other. Ellie captured it best: “I may be a solo founder, but I can look to every single member of our SLI cohort for advice.”
Closing the evening, Georgetown Entrepreneurship’s Ben Zimmerman called the founders “change makers” and “values-based entrepreneurs,” tying their summer back to Georgetown’s commitment to entrepreneurship for the common good, and reminding them that Summer Launch is one chapter in a much longer story. A story continues this fall as the cohort prepares for Rocket Pitch (October 1) and Bark Tank (November 10).
For more information about the Summer Launch Incubator, visit the Georgetown Entrepreneurship website.