{"id":864594,"date":"2026-08-20T05:00:13","date_gmt":"2026-08-20T05:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/864594\/"},"modified":"2026-08-20T05:00:13","modified_gmt":"2026-08-20T05:00:13","slug":"uw-celebrates-student-ventures-outlines-campus-entrepreneurship-goals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/864594\/","title":{"rendered":"UW celebrates student ventures, outlines campus entrepreneurship goals"},"content":{"rendered":"

University of Wisconsin-Madison student Elena Motonishi\u2019s personal experience managing asthma became the basis of an entrepreneurial venture that offers support when medical professionals cannot.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Her web platform, called Lobelia, is an AI-powered personal asthma management platform that uses health data, environmental factors and more to provide users with personalized risk assessments and advice.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI realized that even though we do have a lot of medical support from doctors, we didn\u2019t have enough of a support system in-between doctor visits,\u201d said Motonishi. \u201cI\u2019ve lived with asthma for a while, and daily management has been a little bit challenging, so I wanted to build something that makes that process easier.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"University of Wisconsin-Madison students Elena Motonishi and Peyton Howardsmith, co-founders of Lobelia
Photo by Brittney Kenaston<\/p>\n

Motonishi and her co-founders, Peyton Howardsmith and Vinisha Agnihotri, were among several UW-Madison student entrepreneurs showcasing AI-related ventures at an End of Summer Tech & Entrepreneurship Celebration held Monday at 1403 University Ave. on campus.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The event, part of the first day of Forward Fest in Madison<\/a>, was hosted by the UW Tech Exploration Lab, founded just last year, and the new Wisconsin Entrepreneurship Hub, which works to foster innovation and support campus entrepreneurs with a variety of services and resources.<\/p>\n

Monday\u2019s celebration brought together students, founders, industry professionals, researchers and alumni. It provided a window into new companies and innovations coming out of the university and demonstrated UW-Madison\u2019s plans to strengthen its position as a hub for founders across disciplines.<\/p>\n

The student ventures showcased at the event, in addition to Lobelia, included:<\/p>\n

Verity.ai, a program that reads the user\u2019s math or chemistry work as they write it on a tablet, flags any lines where their thinking went wrong and helps them learn to fix it;
\nVeinSight, a low-cost, AI-assisted system that aims to help clinicians reduce failed IV attempts by visualizing veins and ranking potential access sites;
\nPraxora, which provides medical students with AI-driven clinical simulation and diagnostic games for low-pressure, on-demand practice interviewing patients and reasoning through cases;
\nBluWorld, a social network that helps users connect with the city they are in, identifying interesting destinations and tasks in the style of a virtual world;
\nFlow AI, an intelligent campus information assistant that aims to help students navigate university life; and
\nEdgeHarness, a harness or guard of sorts for small, local large language models (LLMs) that helps improve their reliability for real office tasks by having them plan, check and correct their own mistakes.<\/p>\n

The celebration also introduced Agentic AI Club, a new student organization building consumer-facing products with agentic AI to help automate digital tasks.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\t\t\t\tSocial network BluWorld helps users connect with the city they\u2019re in and complete interesting local adventures<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\t\t\t\tThe Verity.ai program reads users\u2019 math or chemistry work as they write to flag lines where their thinking went wrong and help them correct it<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\t\t\t\tAn event attendee tests out VeinSight, an AI-assisted system that helps medical professionals visualize veins and rank access sites<\/p>\n

Cecily Brose, innovation and commercialization specialist at the Entrepreneurship Hub, discussed the university\u2019s goals surrounding entrepreneurship and supporting new ventures \u2014 starting with the lofty aim to \u201cbecome the No. 1 public university for founders.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have set the bar high,\u201d Brose said, joking. \u201cWe didn\u2019t set a date yet, but we\u2019re going to achieve this. And this is only going to happen with everyone working together. \u2026 This is a collective ecosystem.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Brose said the hub\u2019s major priorities include developing pipelines for founders across disciplines, building pathways for recruitment, development and launch; and helping faculty, staff and students translate research into companies by coordinating with entities like the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, research centers, venture partners and funding sources.<\/p>\n

\"\"Cecily Brose, innovation and commercialization specialist at the Entrepreneurship Hub, discussed the university\u2019s goals surrounding entrepreneurship
Photo by Brittney Kenaston<\/p>\n

In addition, the hub is focused on aligning entrepreneurship programs across the campus to reduce fragmentation and improve visibility and coaching opportunities for founders. It will also work to strengthen UW-Madison\u2019s connection to venture capital and startup ecosystems.<\/p>\n

\u201cEntrepreneurship has been something that has been strong here on campus forever,\u201d said Brose. \u201cThis is in our DNA. \u2026 What we\u2019re going to be doing here at the hub is going to amplify all of the wonderful things happening across campus. We are here to make sure \u2026 that we are all moving forward together.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sandra Bradley, the UW Tech Exploration Lab\u2019s executive director, outlined its fall plans.<\/p>\n

The lab, led by the Wisconsin School of Business in collaboration with the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, focuses on emerging technologies across disciplines and fosters partnerships with industry, alumni and funders.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It helps students assess if ideas are worth building through mentorship and hands-on experimentation, while connecting them with industry partners, researchers, campus partners and faculty.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The lab encompasses over 400 students across campus, more than 120 ventures and projects and over 100 mentors.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the things about the lab is it\u2019s really intended to bring people together\u2026 and then we build stuff!\u201d said Bradley. \u201c The thing that really attracts people to the lab \u2026 (is) we really found this opportunity to come at innovation entrepreneurship from a problem-first perspective. What problem are we trying to solve? Can we bring multidisciplinary teams in and identify use cases for emerging technologies \u2014 especially applied AI today?\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"Sandra Bradley, the UW Tech Exploration Lab\u2019s executive director, outlined its fall plans
Photo by Brittney Kenaston<\/p>\n

Students can apply to one of the lab\u2019s three tracks each semester, Bradley said. The lab\u2019s Venture Pathway is focused on taking ideas to prototypes to ventures; its Industry Innovation track centers on solving real industry problems; and its Innovation Translation track transforms UW research ideas into ventures.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Bradley noted that industry partners and researchers can join the lab through sponsorship or other involvement, while alumni and donors can invest to fund a fellowship or founder lab.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201c(We want) to be able to activate all of that industry \u2026 with those alumni insights, and participation from the broader community,\u201d Bradley said. \u201cThe more we can create connections, the better we can do.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Bradley said this fall, the lab will host weekly, monthly and special events.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Weekly events will include lab and virtual office hours for students to collaborate and receive feedback, as well as Build Nights co-run with Transcend, a UW-Madison student-led entrepreneurship and startup organization that helps connect student founders with funding and mentorship.<\/p>\n

Monthly networking and Industry Problem Drop events will bring together student teams with industry partners who present a real problem for teams to work on in four-week sprints. There will also be monthly founder and mentor guest office hours for direct conversation with student teams.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Bradley announced that BuildFest \u2014 a 30-hour, campus-wide innovation event where multidisciplinary teams turn ideas from across emerging tech tracks into working prototypes \u2014 will take place Sept. 26-27 this year.<\/p>\n

Demo Night \u2014 the lab\u2019s end-of-semester showcase, where students present their projects, prototypes and innovations, expo-style \u2014 will be held on Nov. 19.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"University of Wisconsin-Madison student Elena Motonishi\u2019s personal experience managing asthma became the basis of an entrepreneurial venture that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":864595,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[45,49,48,137],"class_list":["post-864594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entrepreneurship","tag-business","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entrepreneurship"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/864594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=864594"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/864594\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/864595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=864594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=864594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=864594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}