Michigan Startups

The University of Michigan is host to an enormous entrepreneurial ecosystem, including many growing startups founded by current students and alumni. Here’s a selection of current ventures—if you’d like to add your startup to the list, fill out this form.

MeetYourClass

MeetYourClass is a platform that connects incoming college students across North America via Instagram to form communities and friendships before stepping on campus. Capitalizing on the popularity of "Class Accounts" and the fact that 76% of Generation Z are on Instagram daily, this allows seamless funneling into the MeetYourClass platform that aims to optimize university social media presence, ultimately improving enrollment, application, and retention rates. By making available and driving community and sub-groups on campus, MeetYourClass focuses on enhancing the overall college experience for students and institutions, helping them build strong connections before arriving at their respective colleges.

  • Founders: Blake Mischley (UM CSE '25), Kaleb Schmottlach (UM CE '25), Jonah Liss (Ross BBA '25), Jon Millar (UM MCDB '25)

  • Traction: Since our launch in September 2022, we have grown to support 150+ colleges. Across our pages, we have grown to 100k+ followers, reached over 1 million users, and posted more than 40k+ posts. On our website, more than 60k+ account creations and over 25k+ uses of our roommate finder.

  • Website: www.meetyourclass.com

  • Fundraising? No

  • Point of Contact: Blake Mischley, [email protected]

C-PRO

C-PRO connects homeowners with home service providers over virtual calls to help troubleshoot and diagnose their house issues. We are the telemedicine for home issues.

  • Founder: Boyang Wang (Ross Weekend MBA ‘23)

  • Additional Michigan Team Members: Faith (Ross BBA ‘24), Zongyao Wang (UM LSA Masters ‘23), Jinghan Zhang (UM LSA Masters ‘23)

  • Traction: Michigan Business Challenge finalist, Stu Clark Business Competition finalist, OptiMize Social Impact Challenge fellowship award, and A2NewTech Pitch Competition second place

  • Website: https://www.cpro.homes/

  • Fundraising? Yes

  • Point of Contact: Boyang Wang, [email protected]

Dialysis Innovations

Our business venture provides a novel innovative life changing solution to end stage kidney patients by providing a smart dialysis needle that ensures better cannulation, better dialysis care by enhancing the patient and provider experience at lower cumulative costs by reducing infiltrations. Dialysis innovations strives to replace pain with promise for those kidney patients on dialysis.

ATo Innovations

Travel Aqua Purifier (TAP) is a portable water purifier that can clean up to 300 GPH from any sweet water source. This is a perfect solution to support natural disaster relief efforts for your family or as an emergency relief organization looking to help a neighborhood. It can be powered from any house power source outlet, generator, emergency battery, car battery, or solar panel.

FUSE

FUSE is a one-stop application which empowers asylum seekers to find their way in the US financial system and take control of their new lives. With over two-thirds of refugees owning a smartphone, an online platform for financial management and orientation can significantly improve their integration into the United States. Fusing together multiple services, our bank-enabled app allows asylum seekers to open a bank account, build credit, access financial orientation resources, professional development opportunities, local coupons, and manage their government cash assistance in any language they speak.

  • Founders: Margo Steinhaus (UM MPP '23), Christian Neubacher (UM MPP '23)

  • Traction: We won the 2022 Audience Choice Award at the University of Michigan’s Innovation in Action competition. This entailed winning a $1,000 prize. In addition, we are participating in the Dare2Dream start-up development accelerator program through the University of Michigan, for which we are receiving a $500 stipend.

  • Fundraising? Yes

  • Point of Contact: Margo Steinhaus, [email protected]

Citrimer

Citrimer is developing fully-recyclable, sustainable materials derived from citrus-waste for industrial and consumer applications.

  • Founders: Anthony Berardi (UM PhD '24, Macromolecular Science and Engineering), W. Benton (Ben) Swanson (UM DDS/PhD '24, Biologic and Material Sciences)

  • Traction: Citrimer took home the the Pryor-Hale First Place Invention Track Award, the OneMagnify Best in Business Award, the Michigan Investment Challenge Award, and the MBC Elevator Pitch Award at the 2023 Michigan Business Challenge! We are actively pursuing customer discovery, business development, and product engineering and hope to officially launch in Q2 2023.

  • Website: www.citrimer.com

  • Fundraising? Yes

  • Point of Contact: Anthony Berardi, [email protected]

ModernVivo

The drug development process is costly and ineffective, as it costs up to 6 billion dollars to take a single drug from the lab through human clinical trials, where they fail 90% of the time. This is largely due to preclinical animal studies consistently failing to predict clinical success. At ModernVivo we are developing a B2B SaaS software suite that helps pharmaceutical companies, contract research organizations, and academic labs design optimized preclinical in-vivo models to improve drug translation, clinical success, and reduce development costs.

CityView

A major issue, in cities is internal fragmentation where individual departments are launching data-driven projects and tools to address specific pain points. For example, the environmental team may be focused on monitoring and improving air quality, while the public works department needs to reduce the cost and improve the ease of management of public lighting. Within the office for transportation, different teams may be working on road safety, traffic flow, and traffic signal operations. The problem is that these individual systems are not talking to each other. It becomes very difficult – almost impossible – for the cities to make good use of the data in these separate siloed systems.

We suggest building a unified data governance and data exchange platform and warehouse (it is also about UX). The goal is to bring together a wide variety of previously siloed data from different government departments, such as social services, education, healthcare, housing, etc, and automate the flow of information and all sorts of collaborations. This will allow cross-analytics of multiple systems as well as prescriptive and predictive analytics. Also, the biggest benefit of combining the data is that you know what is happening in another system.

AudioOdyssey

AudioOdyssey is building an interactive and engaging suite of audio-based entertainment designed to prevent drowsy driving accidents among truck drivers. Our mission is to prevent drowsy driving accidents on the road and save lives.

SeaSpider

We aim to improve the identification of abandoned fishing nets in sensitive coral reefs in order to allow conservation organizations to remove these hazards that kill wildlife and destroy coral reefs.