A team called Soundwave, made up of Seattle-area high school students, won the TiE Young Entrepreneur (TYE) Seattle chapter finals competition with their artificial intelligence-enabled accent softening program for call center agents. Soundwave will now move on to TYE’s Global Business Plan Competition next month. Two other groups also gained recognition for their business ideas: KEY Beauty, an AI and scanning technology platform for makeup shade matches for girls and women of color, and MyPath, an AI-driven college counseling bot for high school students. Ten other teams received $250 awards for various categories, and three teams won honorable mention prizes.
The finalists were part of the TYE 2023-2024 program, which mentors young entrepreneurs in creating and launching their first real businesses. The Seattle program featured 14 teams with over 70 young entrepreneurs presenting their ideas in two semifinal tracks. Along with Soundwave, other business ideas from Seattle-area schools included a two-sided marketplace for carbon credits, a haptics and LIDAR-enabled camera for the visually impaired, biodegradable bottles, analyzing real-time concussion-related data, and an AI bot for special needs and autistic individuals.
During the program, TYE mentors support students in ideation, market opportunity assessment, product-market fit validation, and prototype creation, aiming to provide students with essential skills and knowledge for creating a viable startup. The final competition was judged by a panel of Seattle-area tech executives, including Anoop Gupta, CEO of SeekOut; Joseph Sirosh, CEO of Creators AGI; Aseem Datar, vice president of Next-Gen Computing & AI at Microsoft; and Sabrina Wu, a principal at Madrona Venture Group. SeekOut CTO Aravind Bala, a TYE instructor and mentor, commended the students’ dedication, collaboration, and innovation.
Soundwave, comprised of Pradyu Kandala, Sathvik “Andy” Kurapati, Dhruv Arora, Vedaant Kulkarni, Prithvi Aravind, and Koshin Sharma, will represent TYE Seattle at the TYE Global Business Plan Competition in Silicon Valley. Founded in 2000, TiE Seattle is a chapter of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), a global nonprofit organization with 61 chapters in 14 countries focused on promoting and nurturing entrepreneurship worldwide. The success of students in the TYE program not only showcases their entrepreneurial potential but also serves as an inspiration to mentors, judges, instructors, and the broader TiE community. It is clear that these young entrepreneurs are not just the business leaders of the future, but also a dynamic force driving innovation and creativity in today’s entrepreneurial landscape.
