The 2026 UVA i.Lab cohort of founders celebrates at Demo Night, the conclusion of the 10-week venture startup program.
Under the Rotunda’s Dome, 21 Startups Take Flight
10 August 2026
School News / Entrepreneurship and Innovation
On 4 August, the University of Virginia’s newest business founders took the stage inside the historic Rotunda with all the confidence of seasoned entrepreneurs who had learned to embrace uncertainty. Their ventures brought them to the stage, but their transformation was the real story.
Welcome to Demo Night, the UVA i.Lab Incubator’s annual showcase. During the event, founders of 21 ventures who completed a 10-week startup program hosted by the Darden School of Business Batten Institute of Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology pitched their businesses to an audience of peers, mentors, investors and other supporters of the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
“The Bumps Are the Road”
In her keynote address, Darden Dean Yael Grushka-Cockayne emphasized that “Entrepreneurship is central to what we do at Darden. Entrepreneurship matters because it’s a powerful way to learn and help create value under uncertainty.”
Darden Dean Yael Grushka-Cockaybe addresses the Rotunda crowd during Demo Night.
That message resonated with many members of this year’s i.Lab cohort.
“The biggest thing I learned is that entrepreneurship is about navigating unforeseen challenges without losing your internal compass,” said McIntire School of Commerce student Zave Greene, co-founder of CorridorIQ, which helps companies integrate AI into daily operations by building a company-owned context layer that connects knowledge, decisions and workflow. “When we introduced our product to the enterprise world, customers found value in unexpected ways. Letting go of assumptions, listening closely and adapting strengthened our business.”
Grushka-Cockayne called the i.Lab a reflection of UVA at its best: “Active, rigorous, student-centered, grounded in practice and strengthened by the community that challenges and supports one another. Through the Batten Institute, Darden invests in this work because now, more than ever, the world needs people who can identify real problems, mobilize others and build responsible solutions.”
That investment, according to Batten Institute Executive Director Omar Garriott, is ultimately an investment in people. “At the i.Lab, we grow founders,” Garriott said. “The ventures are amazing, and, sure, we hope to see more AgroSpheres, Rhobacks, Beanstalks and Tom Tom Festivals. But the ventures themselves are really vehicles for their founders’ growth and development.”
UVA engineering undergrad Aaditya Kotadia, founder of Cardinal, an AI communication coach, discovered something he hadn’t expected at the i.Lab: generosity. “No one’s gatekeeping information, and we all want to see one another succeed,” he said. The experience reshaped his outlook. His new mindset, he said, is to “give as much as I’m receiving.” He’s also become more comfortable putting himself out there. “Customer interviews were scary and difficult,” he admitted, “but they ended up being the best thing.”
Garriott believes the importance of entrepreneurship extends beyond startups. “Anyone who wants to create change and make an impact needs an entrepreneurial mindset and skillset,” he said. “It’s no longer a nice-to-have; it’s a must-have. And the best way to develop it is by doing it.”
According to Garriott, entrepreneurship education is essential for preparing students to meet life’s challenges, regardless of their chosen career path. As he put it, “Navigating a bumpy road is the most crucial, most durable skill for any career in any sector. Actually, it’s the crucial life skill. The bumps are the road.”
Rick Kulow, i.Lab’s longtime Entrepreneur-in-Residence and mentor to many founders, echoed Garriott’s sentiment. “Entrepreneurship is about more than starting a business,” Kulow said. “Its principles are valuable in every aspect of life, and I absolutely believe that we should teach them to every student.”
10 Weeks, Five Schools, One Incubator
This year’s i.Lab Incubator ventures were led by students and alumni from five UVA schools: Darden, McIntire, the School of Engineering and Applied Science, the School of Medicine and the College of Arts & Sciences.
Applicants were required to demonstrate traction in their ventures to be selected for the i.Lab’s rigorous program. Once admitted, said Garriott, “These founders spent 10 breakneck weeks with us, with one another in accountability groups and with mentors building, selling, iterating, conducting customer discovery, prototyping, pivoting and marketing.”
Lessons From the Alumni Playbook
Jennifer L. West, dean of the School Engineering and Applied Science, emphasized that an entrepreneurial mindset is valuable across all disciplines, particularly in engineering. “An entrepreneurial mindset is essential for every engineer,” she said. “Engineers combine expertise in science, mathematics, computation, and design with curiosity and creativity to address pressing challenges. Starting a company is often the most effective way to turn an idea into a product with real-world impact. Many UVA engineers have become successful founders and have benefited from experiences such as i.Lab.”
Engineering alumnus Payam Pourtaheri is a case in point. Pourtaheri and his co-founder Ameer Shakeel met in their final year as biomedical engineering students at UVA. Their venture, AgroSpheres, a Charlottesville-based agricultural biotechnology company, got its start in the i.Lab 10 years ago and has since been recognized as one of the top green businesses in the world.
In his keynote at Demo Night, Pourtaheri shared some lessons from the trenches.
“You, the founder, choose your co-founders, set the vision and decide what gets incubated,” he said. “But the hard truth is that what you’re working on today may look very different a few months or years from now. It’s probably going to change. We started out remediating pesticides. Now we make them, but we make them safe and sustainable.”
The Founders’ Experience, Up Close
For the founders themselves, the i.Lab experience wasn’t about polishing their pitch decks. It was about confronting the messy, humbling realities of building something new from scratch.
An i.Lab founder makes the pitch in support of his venture during Demo Night.
Engineering student Hamzeh Hammad, co-founder of Muro, a marketplace for physical indoor advertising space, arrived at the i.Lab brimming with confidence. “I came in thinking, ‘This idea is so good,’ and then I was humbled,” he admitted. “I realized it was much harder to execute than I’d thought. It’s not perfect, but when I look at it, I think, “Wow, this really meets a need.’”
Darden Class of 2027 student Malorie Black, co-founder of GoGood, a volunteer management platform for small and mid-sized nonprofits, captured the emotional landscape of entrepreneurship with candor. “Being a founder can be a lonely and difficult journey, filled with emotional highs and lows,” she said. “For me, the most valuable part was being surrounded by a community of people who were all in the same boat, while working on very different things. It was an incredibly collaborative and welcoming environment. Our entrepreneur-in-residence was there three times a week, and we would talk, share ideas and collaborate. That positive energy pushed us forward and gave us momentum.”
McIntire undergraduate Tina Yao, co-founder of Girls Who Innovate, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering high school and college girls interested in entrepreneurship, distilled her summer into two core takeaways. “First, no matter how much you anticipate and prepare for an outcome, things may not turn out as expected,” said Yao. “There’s always uncertainty, so you have to be willing to improvise. Second, it’s about picking yourself up when you don’t achieve your goal—moving forward, revisiting your hypothesis, iterating and trying something new.”
Yao appreciated the peer group structure baked into the program. “The peer groups were my favorite thing because I’d hop on the weekly calls, and I got to learn a lot about my peers’ ventures and about my own,” she said. “It was really rewarding because the two people I often saw were Darden students Malorie Black and Andrew Katz, who also served as my mentors.”
The Real Measure of the Journey
Grushka-Cockayne’s keynote message reframed Demo Night not as an ending of a 10-week program but as a new beginning.
“Whatever happens next with your venture,” she told the founders, “the capabilities you’ve developed here will stay with you, and we hope you’ll continue to benefit from them. Remember, the measure of the summer is not only what you’ve built, but also what you’ve learned, whom you’ve served and how you’ve grown as a leader.”
It’s a sentiment that cuts to the heart of what the i.Lab experience is really about. The ventures may scale or fold, but the founders who walked out of the Rotunda that night carried something no market downturn can take away: the mindset and skillset to navigate uncertainty and the network of mentors and peers who shared the trenches.
The i.Lab Incubator is run by the Batten Institute for Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. Learn more about the program and this year’s ventures here.
About the University of Virginia Darden School of Business
The University of Virginia Darden School of Business prepares responsible global leaders through unparalleled transformational learning experiences. Darden’s graduate degree programs (Full-Time MBA, Part-Time MBA, Executive MBA, MSBA and Ph.D.) and Executive Education & Lifelong Learning programs offered by the Darden School Foundation set the stage for a lifetime of career advancement and impact. Darden’s top-ranked faculty, renowned for teaching excellence, inspires and shapes modern business leadership worldwide through research, thought leadership and business publishing. Darden has Grounds in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the Washington, D.C., area and a global community that includes 20,000 alumni in 90 countries. Darden was established in 1955 at the University of Virginia, a top public university founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819 in Charlottesville, Virginia.
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Darden School of Business
University of Virginia
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