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About · R&D

R&D

The Research & Development team is the build arm of Founders, where ideas become working products. Our project teams partner with startups, build tools for student entrepreneurs at UIUC, and launch ventures of their own, shipping something real every semester.

The build arm of Founders, where ideas become working products.

Led by
  • Amey Gupta, Head of R&D
  • Renee George, Project Lead
  • Aadhavan Sridharan, Project Lead
  • Justin Horton, Project Lead
Meet the whole R&D team →
Initiatives

Current projects

Fall 2026
  1. 01In progress

    Rewind

    A lecture video sifter: AI finds the exact timestamps where a concept was covered in class, so you can jump straight to it.

    Renee George (Project Lead), Akshay Pespunuri

  2. 02In progress

    Archean Interns

    Neural network replication, working with Archean Sciences, a startup building synthetic neurocomputers from living brain cells.

    Justin Horton (Project Lead), Shrishant Hattarki, Lily Jia, Avik Solanki, Faisal Almugaiteeb

  3. 03In progress

    Nod

    Predicts whether a doctor's office's insurance claim will be approved and helps perfect it, cutting denials so patients get their medication on time.

    Aadhavan Sridharan (Project Lead), Kushal Trivedi, Kaashish Venkataramanan, Aritro Bhattacharjee, Dev Dhooper

How it works

R&D works year-round to build technological solutions to problems facing the Founders and entrepreneurship ecosystems at UIUC. Projects are built in teams of five or six, each led by an experienced Project Lead.

Members own a real piece of the product from design through deployment, working closely with their Project Lead and directly with founders. Every team demos its work at the end of the semester. We are primarily a software team, but we welcome anyone who builds and wants to ship something real alongside us.

Each semester, every project team takes on 1 of 3 tracks

Track 01

Startup partnership

Partner with an established startup to build real products for the founder and their target users.

Track 02

Community tools

Design and build tools for student entrepreneurs and the broader UIUC startup community.

Track 03

Venture building

Identify a problem and build a startup around it from the ground up, idea to working product.

Other teams
Events →Exploration →Community →