Inventing a new product that can be held in your hands and successfully delivered to a waiting market is sometimes likened to giving birth. If we knew from the beginning how hard it would be, fewer people would give birth.
Over the course of 10 weeks this summer, Rev’s Prototyping Hardware Accelerator took product teams from ideas written on the back of a napkin to full-fledged startups. With projects ranging from categories from climate tech to agricultural innovations, and from canoe racing tools to improved tea dispensers, teams had access to industry experts who worked together to determine whether their concepts were commercially desirable, technically feasible, and economically viable.
EquiPad team members Brian Wong (center right) and Sanjana Ghulam (right) discuss their prototype with fellow entrepreneurs.
The program will culminate with a free, public hardware demo day on August 1 where teams will have the opportunity to demonstrate their progress and pitch their products to community members, potential investors and partners. Tickets can be reserved here.
Rev: Ithaca Startup Works director Ken Roeser said this year’s 22 teams are the most diverse yet, with about half students and half professionals, a significant number of female founders and many participants without direct ties to Cornell.
“I came across Rev by chance on LinkedIn,” says AnalytiTech co-founder Christopher Cilip, who grew up in Corning, New York, and has worked on deep-learning camera systems. For Bryan Wong, Pooja Patel, and Sanjana Gurram, who lead the team behind EquiPad, a sustainably designed disposable menstrual product, their connection was forged during a UC Berkeley course on eliminating plastics from the supply chain.
But what unites this year’s team is a deep desire to solve problems, right wrongs, and make elegant solutions fairly accessible. It’s personal.
“In the run up to Christmas, I spent time searching for Cantonese toys for the children in my family,” says Annie Hua, founder of Babel Blocks, an interactive stuffed toy that allows parents to customize the language settings. “I’m not a parent, but I’ve spoken to parents who are raising bilingual or multilingual children, and they told me it’s hard to find toys in their language.”
Each startup in the accelerator is paired with an experienced entrepreneur and has access to a team of hardware engineers to help develop the physical product. For Hua, this meant thinking about what kind of toy would make a beloved “keep.”
“The toy industry creates a lot of waste and plastic toys don’t last long. A stuffed animal could last longer than a plastic toy. What I make could be washable and customizable,” said Hua, a University of Nebraska graduate who met Cornell University and Lev through a women’s entrepreneurship program while working at Bank of America.
AnalytiTech founders Christopher Cilip, Tony Kariuki ’25, and Sasha Logunov ’25 are developing deep learning camera systems for runtime inference applications.
Equity is another driving force behind her mission, Hua said, as she aims to develop a toy that speaks 15 languages, with parents being able to change the language through an app.
“A common complaint from low-income families is that they don’t have time to read to their children. They may have tried to teach their children their native language but gave up due to time constraints,” Hua said.
For the team behind EquiPad, the eight-month journey began with a similar question: how to most effectively impact people at all income levels.
“We decided we didn’t need to boil the ocean to have an impact,” Sanjana Ghulam said of her idea for a roll-based sanitary napkin dispenser, which can be made by extracting cellulose from any plant waste. Their goal is to get the dispensers into American schools, universities, and workplaces for the first time, but making napkins more affordable, accessible, and discreet could mean big things in the developing world for girls and women who might miss school or work because they don’t have access to menstrual products.
Deanna Kocher, associate director of Rev’s hardware program and visiting lecturer in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, said this year’s group was especially collaborative, adopting a “rising tide floats all boats” strategy by balancing strengths and providing input and support where needed.
“Many teams have a very focused and streamlined approach to development,” she said, “focusing on the most important items first and then adjusting and pivoting accordingly.”
AnalytiTech founders Cilip and teammates Tony Kariuki, 25, and Sasha Logunov, 25, aim to use computer vision programs that monitor joint position to leverage AI to give athletes real-time feedback on learned and improvable movements like their golf or batting swing. The low-cost technology can be applied to coaching and performance improvement in golf schools and other sports academies, but Cilip says the longer-term possibilities are myriad.
“It could be used in physical therapy or sports rehabilitation, where you might need to vary from 30 degrees of motion to 90 degrees of motion,” Cilip says. “It would be a good tool for telemedicine because it’s inexpensive to use. It could also be used in animal and veterinary analysis because it has posture detection. The possibilities are endless.”
Annie Hua, founder of Babbel Blocks;
Some of this year’s Accelerator teams are looking to solve one small problem with a big impact. Led by Joanna Tan, a third-year mechanical engineering student at Cornell University, the High Tunnel Titans are tackling a local agricultural problem. Rolling high tunnels are rings that act as portable greenhouses that can be moved to protect plants from rain, sun, and cold, or to give the soil a rest at the end of the growing season, but they’re costly, cumbersome, or both. What if they were lighter and more flexible, able to bend in the wind like a lightweight backpacking tent?
Rolling high tunnels often use a wheel-and-rail system. Tan’s team has devised ways to make the wheels and rails work more smoothly. They are working on creating foldable hoops for easier storage and installation. They are also tinkering with cheaper options, such as tent pegs, to secure these hoops to the ground.
“I’ve spoken to a lot of farmers in Ithaca; my research is mostly on the East Coast. This approach helps create a controlled environment, which allows for an extended growing season,” Tan said. Though she’s not a farmer herself, her team’s vision could benefit smallholder farmers around the world.
“My idea is to target this at small organic farmers,” Tan says, “but it could have broader application.”
Like the metaphor for Rev’s prototyping hardware accelerator itself, her project is about finding new ways to protect and nurture seedlings until the plants are well established and can thrive.
