Startups

A list of startups with founders who spent time in the EDS.

Startups with a human connection to the EDS

The Engineering Design Studio is not a startup incubator, accelerator, venture studio, or investor, but there is a legacy of future entrepreneurs and founding engineers spending a vast amount of their undergraduate time at NYUAD in the EDS. Some worked on their startups as students, and some even ran their startups in parallel to their studies. Most, however, started or joined founding teams after graduation.

Note: The EDS, in no way, claims affiliation with or credit for these startups. Students listed below have gone on to do excellent things and, coincidentally, spent time co-conspiring in the EDS during their undergraduate years.

imagiLabs. Beatrice and Dora graduated in 2016, and went on to found imagiLabs after completing their masters programs in 2018. imagiLabs is an educational hardware and software platform that works to build pathways for the broadest spectrum of human participation in the technology ecosystem. imagiLabs has been an outpost for many NYUAD interns and graduates over the years. Interestingly, Dora is now part of a tech power-couple, as her partner, Anton, is a co-founder at Lovable.

Mission Mule. Martin, Zane, and Dani Carelli graduated in 2017 and 2018, and went on to build Mission Mule to serve wildlife conservation needs using autonomous aerial vehicles. Martin and Zane later co-founded Picogrid. Dani moved to SpaceX.

Picogrid. Martin, Zane, and Dan Chirita founded Picogrid in 2020 as they identified ways of delivering on complex remote sensing needs across multiple industries. Check out what Picogrid is up to now.

Coval. Brooke graduated in 2018, spent time at Google and Waymo, and went on to found Coval in 2024. Coval was part of the Y-Combinator Summer 2024 batch. They are working on Simulation & Evaluation for AI Voice & Chat Agents.

Borderless. Veronica and Shunsuke graduated in 2019. Veronica worked with imagiLabs for a couple years after graduation, and Shunsuke worked at WHILL, a personal mobility company, until they founded Borderless in 2022. Borderless helps connect students with international university opportunities. Check out Borderless.

Physical Intelligence. Quan graduated in 2017, earned his PhD from UCSD in 2022, and went on to co-found Physical Intelligence. Quan spent much of his time at NYUAD in the EDS, specifically working on the RoadWatch project that won the 2016 Dubai m-gov service award.

hexafarms. David graduated in 2019 and went on to officially launch hexafarms in Berlin in 2022. He worked on early versions of hexafarms while he was a student at NYUAD. Check out hexafarms.

Aiden.ai. Ling graduated in 2016 and Emil graduated in 2019. Both joined Aiden.ai as early software engineers, and in 2019, Twitter acquired Aiden.ai. Both Ling and Emil stayed with Twitter for a while after the acquisition. Emil went on to work with Picogrid.

Citadel AI. Kenny graduated from NYU Shanghai in 2017 but spent a significant amount of time with us in Abu Dhabi, specifically working on the RoadWatch project that won the 2016 Dubai m-gov service award. He worked at Google in San Francisco for a few years after graduation and founded Citadel in 2020. Check out Citadel AI.

Dismantly. Taza graduated in 2023. He started Dismantly to "Redefine the Auto Recycling Industry through software" and ran it from a desk in the EDS for many of his undergraduate years. Check out Dismantly.

Auren Bikes. Will graduated in 2018 and went on to found Auren Bikes that produces "Bespoke Titanium bikes. Made to order based on your physical geometry, riding personality and budget". Check out Auren Bikes.

Biggerlab. Rock graduated in 2015 and went on to found Biggerlab with the initial mission to create a space in Shanghai where exceptional project work could happen. He's evolved it into a youth programming education institution that combines technology and academics. Check out Biggerlab.

Metorial. Wen graduated in 2025 and was accepted to the Y-Combinator Fall 2025 batch. Wen started Metorial with Tobias, a friend from Austria. Wen worked on it, completely independently of any formal mentorship, while casually camped out in the EDS. Check out what Metorial is doing with MCP.

Diode. Nasheed graduated in 2025 and went on to join the Diode (Y-Combinator Summer 2024) founders, Davide and Lenny (non-NYUAD), as one of their founding engineers. Check out what Diode is doing for the future of PCB design.

KOPAA. Raitis graduated in 2019 and went on to earn his masters from TU Delft in 2023, later founding KOPAA in 2025. He was part of the 2018 NYUAD Solar Decathlon team. Check out the computational and parametric design tools that KOPAA is creating.

Startups with more sparse connections to the EDS

In addition to the startups listed above that have a relatively direct connection to individuals who worked in the Engineering Design Studio, there are a few others with less direct connections to the EDS.

Blacksmith Coffee. Stephen graduated in 2014 and immediately jumped into creating Blacksmith Coffee, grown out of a Student Interest Group on coffee, also called Blacksmith. He and his co-founder, Rafael, used Matt's old office (C1-036) in the Experimental Research Building as their home base and launched with the support of the team that would eventually become StartAD. The EDS's only claim to fame in the Blacksmith startup journey is that Stephen pulled his first shot of espresso on the Rancilio Silvia machine (still alive, as of 2025) in the EDS. Sadly, Blacksmith now mostly serves as a cautionary tale of how student founders can be pushed out of their own companies when they rush to take external money without having term sheets reviewed by competent, independent, legal counsel. Thankfully, Blacksmith remains a vibrant brand; though, Stephen and Rafael no longer have any financial or operational stake in it.

Renovate Robotics. Dylan spent time in the EDS while studying abroad at NYUAD. He's done a number of interesting things post-graduation, including starting Renovate Robotics to automate roofing renovations.

Lumi Labs (Later Sunshine). Will graduated in 2019 and earned his PhD from Georgia Tech (though, spent most of his PhD at Stanford) in 2025. Will was one of the early engineers at Lumi Labs, founded my Marissa Mayer. The company changed names from Lumi Labs to Sunshine in 2020 and eventually wrapped up operations in 2024.

Why future founders spend time in the EDS

As stated above, the EDS is not an official source of advice or education for future founders, so speculation on the existence of a causal relationship should be met with extreme skepticism; the EDS (or any other lab, office, or Student Interest Group at NYUAD) does not create founders. However, the lab has been carefully crafted to foster a kind of thinking that often naturally aligns with being a founder. The room is a "high agency" environment, and that is the best prototype we've found to nourish an entrepreneurial spirit. A space like the EDS is a natural attractor for individuals seeking an environment where the expectation is to produce exceptional outcomes while undertaking challenging, open-ended problems, with shifting constraints, where risk of failure is, decidedly, non-zero.

Additionally, Matt, the director of the EDS, has served on the selection committee for the in5 Tech incubator in Dubai since 2016. In this role, he has reviewed literally thousands of startup pitches (250+ per year) from founders seeking support to grow their startups in Dubai. This amounts to an implicit promise that if you come to the EDS for a conversation about startups, it will never be boring. in5 Tech is part of the in5 ecosystem (Tech, Media, Design, and Science) and operates under Dubai Holding.

General Advice

1. You probably don't need money right now.
2. Not all money is good money. Be picky, and learn about structures like SAFE Notes.
3. You likely need to more authentically understand what you're working on.
4. Your ideas need to survive brutal critique; customers, competitors, and investors don't have to be nice.
5. Wanting to be rich isn't a good enough reason to start a company.
6. If you don't have first-hand experience with the idea you're working on, your co-founder should.
7. You need a good co-founder.
8. You need a good lawyer.
9. Ensure agreements and contracts are written as if you are not on speaking terms with the other party. They will only be enforced in a situation in which civil discourse has broken down, so you better be in a solid legal position when things go sour.
10. Tarpit Ideas are, by definition, exceedingly tempting and hard to avoid without mentorship.
11. You should cultivate co-conspiratorial mentor relationships, up and down, in which frankness and honesty are front and center.
12. Find or create an environment where people are doing serious work; elevate others and be elevated by this.
13. You probably don't need to drop out (especially if you are on a relatively generous scholarship).
14. If, pre-revenue and pre-money, you haven't worked on your startup everyday for the past two months, you probably don't have a startup. (see: Ideas are Cheap)
15. Go work for a startup instead of searching for a corporate summer internship.
16. You might not need to go to an incubator or accelerator.
17. If you go to an incubator or accelerator, be snobby; only go to a top-tier program. Their fame, reputation, professional network, and access to investors is what will help you most.
18. Letters of Intent (LoI) are not contracts and mean next-to-nothing.
19. Don't build your product rigidly to only serve your first customer's hyper-specific needs; that's consulting.
20. Build something where revenue scales faster than costs; not all customers can be given a white-glove service.
21. You probably need to pivot, not because that's what everyone does, but because your idea hasn't been tested by fire.
22. You probably don't need to do a bunch of entrepreneurship courses.
23. Your first DIY project is exceedingly unlikely to directly translate into a successful company.
24. Your hackathon idea is exceedingly unlikely to directly translate into a successful company.
25. Your research project is exceedingly unlikely to directly translate into a successful company.
26. Your capstone is exceedingly unlikely to directly translate into a successful company.
27. Your mentor's academic research is exceedingly unlikely to directly translate into a successful company.
28. Translating an idea into a company requires just that, an act of translation (not merely direct replication and incorporation).
29. Government structures of thought and policies do not mirror what fuels entrepreneurship.
30. University structures of thought and policies do not mirror what fuels entrepreneurship.
31. Understand Conway's Law: "The structure of any system designed by an organization is isomorphic to the structure of the organization."
32. Learn how to take reasonable and reasonably large risks.
33. "Sure Things" are most likely copy pasta.
34. "Regionalization" is code for copy pasta.
35. Beware of copy pasta. Work on things that offer at least a semblance of novelty.
36. Annoyance plays are just that, annoying. Starting an Uber clone with the hopes that Uber will, one day, be forced to acquire you, is just tacky. Leave that kind of brain-dead nonsense to the brain-dead. Sure, annoyance founders become undeservedly rich; only the wrong people care.
37. Sometimes, in fact quite often, boring-sounding, non-consumer-facing ideas are the most successful.
38. Don't be a "Wantrapreneur", an individual who only seeks the glory of a CV wherein every job title is CEO or founder, regardless of the underlying business.
39. You very likely can't make it cheaper, and you can't compete on price alone.
40. "Making it cheaper" in a university setting is usually just an exercise in improper accounting of resources consumed while developing an idea. You can't just add up the cost of materials of a single prototype.
41. The world isn't fair; don't demand that it is.
42. Being an outsider can help you, but often only at the beginning.
43. Being an insider can hurt you at the beginning. Be aware that you're likely partially-lobotomized and blinded by legacy thinking.
44. The world probably doesn't need another startup from recent graduates of a prestigious university that advises students from their home countries on how to hack the admission processes of prestigious universities.
45. Get good at working under shifting constraints.
46. A problem isn't solved better just because it's solved using something you like or something you are good at. Problems demand to be solved by whatever is the actual best way to solve them, regardless of your personal opinion, affinity, or expertise.
47. A competitive advantage is only advantageous if it's conceptually, technically, or legally hard to copy.
48. Don't compete with a switch. Ideas are weak if they compete with a feature flag or "switch" that can be easily flipped in existing products from established players.
49. You can't make a better iPhone. It's tempting to think you could, and I'm sure you have all kinds of cool ideas. However, you have no means with which to realize those ideas, and you'd be insane to try to mobilze such resources for marginal improvements that, Apple is likely already implementing in their next iPhone release. Apply for an internship at Apple.
50. Don't wait for someone to pay you to work on something you care about or believe in.
51. Be careful about utilizing the word "exponential".
52. Every pitch deck, on average, is the same. Be sure your pitch has a little drama and flare. (See: Figma Seed Stage Pitch)
53. Don't request an NDA prior to discussing your idea.
54. Understand why people say "ideas are cheap". It's not as simple or personal as someone saying that your idea is uniquely cheap. All ideas are cheap. Your idea might be a good one or a bad one, but with some certainty, it is cheap, in the sense that someone else has likely thought of it before, or is currently thinking of it. The question is: are you committed to working the hardest on it?

Interesting Podcasts

1. Acquired
2. American Innovators
3. Business Wars Daily
4. Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders
5. Freakonomics
6. How I built This
7. Masters of Scale
8. Science Vs
9. Search Engine
10. Startups for the Rest of Us
11. The Future of Everything
12. The Next Big Idea
13. The Pitch
14. Distributed with Matt Mullenweg
15. Flash Forward
16. Future Perfect
17. Moonshot
18. Reply All
19. StartUp Podcast
20. The Unicorn Launcher