Two new student-run software ventures, CounselAI and Bamboo Resumes, have been awarded the 2024 Singhal Family Entrepreneurship Awards. CounselAI has won the annual $20,000 Entrepreneurship Award, while Bamboo Resumes has secured a $5,000 Seed Award.
A collaboration between the Department of Computer Science and the Pava Maria LaPere Center for Entrepreneurship, the annual Singhal Family Entrepreneurship Awards were established to help jumpstart student-run ventures in the fast-growing, highly competitive software industry. In addition to funding of up to $30,000, awardee teams will be paired with a software mentor to assist in product development and will have access to: business, marketing, and financial mentorship; investor and advisor networks; and peer/cohort ventures through the Pava Center.
Meet the Teams
CounselAI’s Iris Gupta and Charlie Wheelock. Not pictured: Atharva Barve.
CounselAI was inspired by founder and CEO Iris Gupta’s experience interning with the Baltimore Public Defender’s Office, where she observed the limited resources and tight turnaround times the defense attorneys had to build their cases. A third-year computer science student, Gupta naturally saw the opportunity for AI integration; now, CounselAI promotes legal workflow optimization by automatically processing complex case files and intuitively summarizing critical, case-specific facts.
The team plans to use its award to continue developing its user interface, optimizing its AI algorithms, improving its data privacy measures, and expanding its marketing efforts, after which its goal is to enter into at least three pilot programs with law offices to conduct beta testing.
“This award will be crucial to carrying out a successful pilot program with the Maryland Public Defender’s Office this year, providing the support and resources we need to ensure that our software handles real criminal cases accurately and meets legal data privacy standards,” says Gupta. “We ultimately want to see CounselAI benefitting real defendants.”
In addition to the Singhal Entrepreneurship Award, CounselAI has won a $25,000 prize from Texas Christian University’s Values and Ventures Competition and secured $5,000 in funding at the Pava Center’s Fall 2023 Fuel Demo Day.
Bamboo Resumes’ Andreas Jaramillo and Nicolas Liu.
Bamboo Resumes is an AI-powered resume tailoring service designed to support engineering students with mass applications for internships and full-time positions. Having been through the tedious job-seeking process themselves, founders Andreas Jaramillo and Nicolas Liu wanted to automate it. To this end they developed an end-to-end career service platform that uses AI to generate new templates and reformat resumes to a given job description.
“Using the Singhal Family Seed Award to cover the costs of customer discovery and model training, we will be able to expand quickly, support more users on our platform, and utilize the feedback cycle of user-uploaded resumes to better tune our model to produce more relevant outputs,” says Jaramillo, a second-year student of computer science.
The team is currently sourcing resume data to better train its model and adding more templates to improve user experience in advance of a summer launch.