Photo courtesy of Rice University
Not long after receiving a Young Entrepreneur Award from the NFL Players Association, Pitt senior Kunal Gandhi’s startup, SimpL, gained even more momentum when the company was awarded $30,000 in the prestigious Rice Business Plan Competition earlier in April.
Gandhi, neuroscience and computer science major at Pitt, has been developing an app that uses artificial intelligence to show people in real-time whether their posture or technique is correct while training.
A former master trainer at the University’s Petersen Events Center, Gandhi recognized that many athletes were hurting themselves due to repeated strain resulting from poor training technique.
The app delivers feedback to users during workouts when they are not demonstrating correct posture and form.
The Rice competition bills itself as the “world’s largest and richest” student startup competition. In 2017, Forest Devices, a medical device company founded by Pitt School of Medicine student Matt Kesinger, won the top prize. SimpL becomes only the second Pitt team to place in the competition.
“The most valuable part of SimpL for me was having the opportunity to represent the University of Pittsburgh at a national level. We get to show the rest of the country that great innovation takes place at our university,” Gandhi said. “Additionally, I would say meeting other passion-driven founders as well as investors was a great opportunity for us. I found that the most valuable part for us internally was working as a team and pushing ourselves to keep up with the other incredible schools and founders."
SimpL was awarded two prizes during the Rice Business Plan Competition Awards Ceremony: the $25,000 "Spirit of Entrepreneurship" award, given to the team that most exudes the thrill of entrepreneurship, and the $5,000 Seventh Place prize.
Gandhi said the prize money will be applied for product development, building out features specific to pending partnerships and working through a clinical study.
It will also help with marketing the app with the biggest social media influencers in physical therapy and fitness.
“The next steps for SimpL are building out features for more injures, such as neck, hip, knee, and shoulder, as well as creating a social environment for friends to compete and motivate each other on their journey,” Gandhi said.
“Recovering from an injury can be a lonely process and we plan to use gamification and social aspects to make people feel like they are in this together. We are also fundraising and hiring engineers.”
Babs Carryer, director of the Big Idea Center for Student Innovation and Entrepreneurship, said that Gandhi and his team have sought out every opportunity and resource to advance their idea.
They began their journey by participating in a weekend hackathon sponsored by the Big Idea Center and Pitt's School of Computing and Information. They then participated in the 2020 Randall Family Big Idea Competition, receiving a third place award. Following the competition they entered the Blast Furnace student accelerator where they took advantage of the mentorship from the Center’s entrepreneurs in residence. From there they entered the Center’s incubator, The Forge.