The annual Demo Day at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship showcases and celebrates the entrepreneurial and creative mindsets of MIT students. In September, Demo Day continued this tradition, highlighting 22 innovative startups founded by students in the 14th cohort of the MIT delta v accelerator.
The Trust Center’s MIT delta v accelerator is a capstone entrepreneurial experience that provides coursework, skills training, mentoring, and mock board meetings to graduate and undergraduate student teams from MIT and other top universities across the globe. These students work full-time on their entrepreneurial ventures from June to early September in the Trust Center in Cambridge or in the NYC Startup Studio in Manhattan. The results are nothing short of remarkable.
“Today, they’re going to blow your mind,” said Bill Aulet, SF ’94 (Ethernet Inventors Professor of the Practice; Managing Director, Trust Center), as quoted by MIT News. “They have products—real products—a founding team, a clear mission, customer commitments or letters of intent, legitimate business models, and a path to greatness and impact. In short, they will have achieved escape velocity.”
Using AI in the entrepreneurial journey
One notable feature of the showcased startups was their savvy integration of AI into their activities. Student teams in this year’s MIT delta v cohort used AI tools to speed up coding, create presentations, explore new industries, and generate ideas. Two MIT delta v student participants, Murtaza Jameel, MBA ’26, and Aanchal Arora, SFMBA ’25, spoke to MIT News about their use of AI.
Cognify, Jameel’s company, uses AI to predict customer interactions with digital platforms. The company’s AI models simulate customer behavior to deliver insights into which designs resonate with users, where friction exists in user journeys, and how to build a user experience that converts. These insights help create more successful products.
AI was key in helping to drive Cognfiy’s development as a startup.
“We’re building a design intelligence tool that replaces product testing with instant, predictive simulations of user behavior,” Jameel said. “We’re trying to integrate AI into all our processes: ideation, go to market, programming. All our building has been done with AI coding tools. I have a custom bot that I’ve fed tons of information about our company to, and it’s a thought partner I’m speaking to every single day.”
Meanwhile, Arora emphasized that her MIT delta v team still relied on their own entrepreneurial knowledge to build their company, Mendhai Health. Mendhai Health uses AI and telehealth to provide health services to women struggling with pelvic floor dysfunction during pregnancy and postpartum recovery. The startup’s fully digital, evidence-based platform connects women to a multidisciplinary team of health care professionals including doulas, clinical nutritionists, pelvic floor physical therapists, and sports physical therapists.
Arora’s MIT delta v team found AI to be a useful tool in the entrepreneurial process but augmented their use of it with their own research on customers.
“AI has definitely made the entrepreneurial process more efficient and faster,” said Arora. “Still overreliance on AI, at least at this point, can hamper your understanding of customers. You need to be careful with every decision you make.”
The enduring value of MIT delta v
Although AI has proven to be useful in helping MIT delta v students build their startups and products, students still need to personally connect to their customers to achieve success in the MIT delta v program. Despite the availability of AI, Trust Center staff found that students going through the program this year still encountered many of the typical challenges in the entrepreneurial journey.
“We were prepared at the Trust Center to see a big change and to adapt to that, but the companies are still building and encountering the same challenges of customer identification, beachhead market identification, team dynamics,” Macauley Kenney, SM ’16, (Entrepreneur in Residence, Martin Trust Center; Lecturer, MIT Sloan and D-Lab) told MIT News. “Those are still the big meaty challenges they’ve always been working on.”
As AI continues to shift the entrepreneurial landscape, the value of the MIT delta v program remains strong. The program provides students like Jameel with invaluable resources to overcome these longstanding challenges and grow into successful entrepreneurs.
“I came to MIT with one goal: to start a technology company,” Jameel told MIT News. “The MIT delta v program was on my radar when I was applying to MIT. The program gives you incredible access to resources—networks, mentorship, advisors. Some of the top folks in our industry are advising us on how to build our company. It’s really unique. These are folks who have done what you’re doing 10 or 20 years ago, all just rooting for you. That’s why I came to MIT.”
