by A.J. Kleber
The academic year is drawing to a close, but some entrepreneurial BU ECE students are gearing up for an ambitiously productive summer “break,” working to realize their own business ventures with support from Innovate@BU.
The Summer Accelerator is a 10-week intensive program offering mentorship and $10K in funding to student ventures across a broad variety of industries. Students work towards an August showcase event, when they will present their prospective start-ups to the public. This year, just twelve teams were selected out of nearly one hundred applications, and two are co-led by Computer Engineering majors.
Brennan Mahoney (CE’25) is heading up Redstone alongside a classmate from Questrom, an “all-in-one” application for algorithmic retail trading; the use of an automated process for the purchase and sale of stocks, equity, and other financial instruments by individual (non-professional) investors. The team claims that theirs is the first to group necessary tools onto a single platform, making what can be a complex and daunting process more accessible to individual traders.
On a different business axis altogether, meanwhile, Anya Agidi and Tadiwa Zinyongo (both CE‘26) have teamed up with a couple of classmates to develop Regal Rain Co, a brand of “fashion” umbrellas with a dual focus on style and durability. As any ECE student who has ever had to hurry up St. Mary’s Street to class in the Photonics Building on a rainy day would know, most umbrellas have a very short lifespan indeed; averaging six months, according to the team’s research. Agidi, Zinyongo and their colleagues aim to address this issue while simultaneously transforming umbrellas into the coolest fashion-forward new accessories, targeted especially at their Gen Z peers.
All we can say to these enterprising students is: best of luck, and make it rain!