This year, Georgia Tech's Startup Launch program surpassed 200 startup teams for the first time, marking the largest cohort in the program's history and highlighting the growing momentum for entrepreneurship across campus.
The milestone was driven by startup activity in CREATE-X and Quadrant-i, two cornerstone initiatives of the Office of Commercialization, and reflects the expanding reach of Tech's innovation ecosystem. The programs support students, faculty, researchers, and alumni in transforming ideas into companies within industries ranging from healthcare and robotics to legal technology and accessibility.
"Crossing the 200 startup teams milestone is more than a record. It's a reflection of a commercialization ecosystem that is helping translate ideas into products and companies that solve real problems," said Raghupathy "Siva" Sivakumar, chief commercialization officer. "Building a dense, connected community of founders is essential to our vision of becoming the nation's leading startup campus and maximizing the value of Georgia Tech innovation."
Diverse Paths to Entrepreneurship
The founders behind this year's milestone represent the many paths entrepreneurs can take at Georgia Tech. They come from different disciplines, pursue various industries, and arrive with a wide range of experiences, but all share a desire to solve meaningful problems.
For alumnus Alberto Flores Guerrero, who earned an M.S. in cybersecurity from the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts in 2025, and his longtime friend and co-founder, Luis Estala, that journey to CREATE-X began nearly 2,000 miles from Atlanta.
The pair are building Separate, an AI-powered platform designed to help people navigate divorce by simplifying legal processes, organizing paperwork, and connecting users with resources. Drawing on Flores Guerrero's background as a lawyer, the company aims to make one of life's most stressful experiences more manageable.
When they learned about CREATE-X Startup Launch's kickoff just two weeks before it began, they didn't hesitate. Flying wasn't an option, so they packed the car and drove from Mexico to Atlanta.
Four days later, they arrived at Georgia Tech, convinced the opportunity was worth every mile. Inspired by the kickoff experience, Flores Guerrero soon returned to Mexico, packed his belongings, and moved to Atlanta for the summer.
For both of them, Startup Launch became more than a summer program. It gave them the confidence to build their company as part of a community of founders.
"This experience has completely changed the way we think about ourselves and what's possible for our company," Estala said. "This is the chance of our lives."
"I've learned so much just by being around these people," Flores Guerrero said. "Georgia Tech has some of the smartest students in the world, and then you put the most entrepreneurial of them together in one room. Nice things should happen."
Building a Deep-Tech Startup
For Georgia Tech master's student Rohit Gore in the College of Computing and co-founder Patrick Walsh, entrepreneurship began with one idea. But their startup took shape after they pivoted in a new direction.
As they developed a low-cost drone, they kept encountering the same challenge: Robots that performed well in simulations often struggled in real-world environments. After talking with robotics teams across the country, they launched Brio Robotics, a company developing a simulation and automated testing platform for autonomous systems.
CREATE-X Startup Launch helped the team refine its approach to customer discovery, sales, and commercialization.
"We're engineers by trade, and we don't know anything about B2B sales," Gore said, noting that Startup Launch Director Margaret Weniger “has been hugely helpful. It was so valuable to hear her perspective on what good sales metrics look like, what the goal of a customer call should be, and how to approach those conversations."
Today, Brio Robotics is finalizing its first design partnership with a drone company and has five additional robotics companies in its sales pipeline.
Turning Research Into a Startup
While many startups begin with student entrepreneurs, others emerge directly from Georgia Tech's research labs.
For Yue Chen, associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, commercialization meant looking beyond the lab. Working with Ph.D. students Yixuan Xia, Yilin Cai, and Samuel Wilcox, Chen launched Fructus, a startup developing robotic harvesting technology to help growers address labor shortages and improve harvesting quality.
The technology began as a USDA-funded blackberry harvesting project. But through Quadrant-i Startup Launch, conversations with growers and industry stakeholders revealed a greater opportunity in Georgia's blueberry industry, prompting the team to pivot toward a larger market and a more pressing need.
"For faculty, we focus on research and developing fundamental science" Chen said. "But there's a gap between the work we do in the lab and the final product." Startup Launch helped bridge that gap through customer discovery. It “gave us the opportunity to get out of the lab, talk to stakeholders, and understand what they really need."
For Cai, the experience changed the team's perspective. "As researchers, we usually focus on solving a research problem," he said. "Through Startup Launch, we learned to see the problem from the customer's perspective and think about what it really takes to build a product."
Looking Ahead
More than 150 startups will showcase their ventures at CREATE-X Demo Day on Thursday, Sept. 3, at LOOP, Georgia Tech's newest creative arts and performance venue. The event will bring together students, investors, mentors, industry leaders, and the broader community to meet the founders behind this record-breaking cohort and explore the next generation of Georgia Tech innovation.
"This experience has completely changed the way we think about ourselves and what's possible," Estala said. "If you have an idea, just do it. You never know where it might take you.”
