Cornell University has a slightly more unusual founder story compared to the other Ivies. The original campus is in Ithaca, six hours upstate from New York while Cornell Tech opened in 2017 on Roosevelt Island in Manhattan, built explicitly to produce startups.
Between them, they’ve churned out an extensive range of founders from hospitality graduates running live commerce marketplaces to mechanical engineers building housing microfactories.
Cornell Tech has turned into one of the most productive student-founder pipelines in the country, writing $100,000 cheques every year into each of its top student companies. It just so happens that this year’s winners had already shipped products out by the time the ceremony was over.
The Two-Campus Effect Of Cornell University
Ithaca, the original campus, is where the engineers, biologists and applied economists have been starting companies for decades. It’s home to eLab, Cornell’s flagship student accelerator, the Blackstone Entrepreneurs Network and the McGovern Family Centre for Venture Development, which has helped to launch dozens of hardware and life sciences startups straight out of research labs.
Cornell Tech is a different beast entirely. It opened as a joint venture with Technion and functions more like a founder incubator than a traditional graduate school.
Every master’s student goes through Startup Studio, a compulsory course where teams spend a full semester building something with the intention of taking it to market. The best of them pitch each May at the Startup Awards and winning ventures walk away with $100,000 investment and a place in the Runway programme, which continues to fund and mentor them after graduation.
Successful Alumni Who Founded Startups
We’re taking a look at ten founders and companies who cover about four decades of Cornell startups. Some of them power the software that you probably see at work on a daily basis. Others may have only launched this year but are already making their mark in their respective industries.
The one thing that these founders all have in common is that they have their roots at Cornell, whether it be Ithaca or Roosevelt Island, or both.
1. David Duffield, Co-founder of PeopleSoft and Workday
David Duffield graduated with a BS in Electrical Engineering from Cornell in 1962 and an MBA in 1964. He launched PeopleSoft in 1987 which became one of the defining enterprise software companies of its era, taking on Oracle and SAP for HR and financials.
Oracle acquired PeopleSoft in 2005 in an infamous takeover and Duffield left almost immediately, co-founding Workday the same year to build the cloud-native version of everything he’d learned the first time round. Workday is now used by more than half the Fortune 500 for HR and finance and is worth well over $50 billion.
2. Daniel Cane, Co-founder of Blackboard and Modernising Medicine
Daniel Cane co-founded Blackboard while he was still an undergraduate at Cornell in 1997, building it into the learning management system for universities and eventually taking it public. He then co-founded Modernising Medicine (now ModMed) in 2010 with Dr. Michael Sherling and now runs as co-CEO.
ModMed builds specialty-specific electronic medical records – dermatology, ophthalmology, orthopaedics and urology – to help the doctors using them. Since its founding, ModMed has become one of the most valuable private healthtech companies in the United States.
3. Grant LaFontaine, Co-founder of Whatnot
Grant LaFontaine studied economics at Cornell before going on to work for YouTube and Facebook’s AR/VR group. In 2019, he co-founded Whatnot with Logan Head, which was initially a marketplace for Funko Pops and sports card. The turning point came quickly and they built out live-streamed shopping, a format which hadn’t really been cracked yet in the West.
Subsequently, Whatnot became one of the fastest-growing marketplaces in North America. The platform facilitated more than $3 billion in live sales in 2024 and a Series E early last year valued the company at nearly $5 billion. About one in ten Whatnot sellers now use the platform as their full-time business.
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4. Vikas Enti, Co-founder & CEO of Reframe Systems
Vikas Enti graduated with a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell followed by an MEng from MIT’s System Design and Management programme. He then spent 11 years at Amazon Robotics deploying more than 500,000 robots across the retailer’s fulfilment network.
In 2022, he co-founded Reframe Systems, which uses robotics, software and modular architecture to build climate-resilient, low-carbon housing inside microfactories. Reframe raised $40 million in August 2025 and has projects underway in Massachusetts and southern California where it’s helping to rebuild homes that were destroyed in the January 2025 wildfires.
5. YJ Kim, Co-founder of Velaura AI
YJ Kim earned his MEng from Cornell in 1988 and spent the next 35-plus years running semiconductor businesses, including public-company CEO stints. Velaura AI is his current venture, a co-founding team built ultra-low-power silicon and IP for AI accelerators across data centres, edge computing and physical AI.
Last month, the company closed a Series A round with new investors including Prosperity7, Seligman and Capricorn joining existing backers Mayfield, Samsung Catalyst and Premji Invest.
6. Sujay Jayakar, Co-founder of Convex
Sujay Jayakar graduated from Cornell in 2012 and spent the next 8 years as a principal engineer at Dropbox where he was the tech lead on Nucleus, a full rewrite of Dropbox’s file sync engine. He also did a stint at Microsoft Research working on high-throughput networking.
In 2021, Sujay co-founded Convex, a serverless reactive database that gives web developers a full backend without the usual infrastructure overhead. Convex has since become one of the most talked-about developer-facing platforms of the AI era and closed a Series B last month.
7. Amiraj Dhawan, Co-founder of Luxe Software
Amiraj Dhawan did his MEng in Computer Science at Cornell from 2015-2016 and then spent time at Yelp and DoorDash before founding Luxe Software in 2023. The company builds POS, CRM and payments software specifically for independent jewellers, a category that has quite honestly been running on decades-old duct-taped systems for as long as anyone could remember.
In early 2025, Luxe Software raised a $2 million seed and brought on Val Katayev as CEO with Dhawan moving to Chief Technology Officer.
8. Ryan Nowicki Stewart & Tomas Taylor, Co-founders of Pennant AI
Ryan and Tomas met as Cornell ungrads in 2016 and spent the next ten years sitting at adjacent desks at BlackRock, working on the Aladdin platform for institutional investors. Ryan went on to State Street to cast proxy votes on behalf of shareholders while Tomas went to Harvard Business School and then founded Mindware, building agentic AI infrastructure.
They co-founded Pennant AI, an AI-native operating system for proxy voting and corporate governance, reading live SEC filings and drafting recommendations aligned to each fund’s specific policy.
9. Berat Celik, Co-founder & CEO of Stoa
Berat Celik graduated from Cornell Tech earlier this year with his MEng in Computer Science and walked away from an offer to join xAI, instead co-founding Stoa with two long-time high school friends.
Stoa is trying to build the financial infrastructure for the AI hardware market, starting with an RFQ marketplace for GPUs where dealers bid blind and buyers get firm quotes within 48 hours. In its first month live, the platform processed more than $300 million in RFQs.
10. Carlos Guerrero Spota & Chloe Wang, Co-founders of Custos
As AI agents begin to make actual financial transactions on behalf of companies, someone needs to make sure that they don’t accidentally send $50,000 to the wrong vendor because that would be, well, catastrophic.
Custos wraps existing payment infrastructure with programmable spending policies, real-time enforcement and full audit trails so companies can safely delegate financial actions to their agents. The company was founded by two Cornell Tech master’s students, Carlos Guerrero Spota and Chloe Wang.
