On Sunday, June 14, students, alums, faculty, mentors, and industry leaders gathered at Penn GSE for the Education Entrepreneurship (EdEnt) program’s annual Venture Showcase and Pitch Competition, an end-of-year celebration highlighting ventures designed to address some of education’s most pressing challenges.
The event brought together members of the program’s 12th cohort alongside alum entrepreneurs, many of whom returned to serve as mentors, showcase presenters, and competition judges. Throughout the afternoon, attendees explored ventures spanning AI-powered tutoring, language learning, STEM enrichment, mathematics curriculum innovation, and other emerging solutions aimed at improving learning experiences around the world.
“What makes a day like today unique is the fact that we have alumni here. We have our students here. We have our alumni playing the role of pitch judges,” Associate Program Director Phil Price said. “Graduating is not an end, it’s a beginning.”
That theme of community and continuity was evident throughout the day as graduating students prepared to join a global network of more than 550 EdEnt alums working across nearly 50 countries.
At the center of that work is the program’s year-long capstone experience, led by faculty and industry leaders Robert Nashak, Caroline Hill, Shahab Kaviani, and David Fu. Together, they guide students through a full academic incubator process that includes ideation, design, testing, venture development, and acceleration, supporting as many as 50 student ventures each year.
Unlike traditional graduate programs built around a semester-long thesis project, students in the EdEnt program spend the entire year developing a venture tied to a problem they are passionate about solving.
That work was on display during the Venture Showcase, where current students and alumni presented ventures at various stages of growth and implementation. Among them was Celine Xu, GED’26, founder of AskSia, an adaptive AI tutoring platform designed to provide highly personalized learning support. The platform aims to understand individual learners, identify areas where they are struggling, and generate customized study plans, assessments, and academic support tools.
Xu said one of EdEnt’s greatest strengths is helping students move from ideas to implementation.
“Most of my classmates, yes, they do have an idea,” she said. “But they don’t have the environments that actually help them to translate it into a product.”
Although AskSia existed before she entered the program, Xu said the venture evolved significantly throughout the year through coursework, faculty guidance, and customer feedback.
“We pivoted, actually three, four times based on the feedback the instructor gave me,” she said. “It’s a really rewarding journey.”
For many alums, the annual showcase serves as an opportunity to reconnect with a community that continues to shape their professional and entrepreneurial journeys.
Britton Carnevali, GED’23, attended the event to showcase a new EdEnt alumni portal she is helping develop. The platform is designed to help graduates maintain connections, find mentors, share opportunities, and continue supporting one another’s ventures long after graduation.
“We wanted it to be built by the community and driven by the community,” Carnevali said. “Overall, I think this highlights the community that’s naturally built within this program and everyone’s desire to keep those connections alive.”
That spirit carried into the evening’s Pitch Competition, the capstone event of the program year, when students submit recorded pitches that are reviewed by a panel of alumni judges. Following multiple rounds of evaluation, four finalists are selected to present their ventures live during the final intensive of the program.
The competition reflects the program’s commitment to alumni engagement. Pitch Competition finalists return the following year as judges, while many graduates continue supporting students as advisors, mentors, and industry experts. Seven alumni have also gone on to serve in faculty roles within the program.
This year’s finalists were Barbara Beske, GED’26; Paige Guo, GED’26; Kai Huang, GED’26; and Dasha Smirnova, GED’26. The ventures reflected the breadth of challenges students sought to address. Beske’s Quantitative Reasoning with Data (QRD) reimagines mathematics education for students whose future goals do not necessarily follow traditional STEM pathways. Guo’s venture, Grow Beyond English, helps parents support early English language development through everyday family routines. Huang’s WonderLabAI combines AI guidance with hands-on science kits to create immersive STEM learning experiences for children. And Smirnova’s Belang provides personalized AI-powered language coaching for adult English learners.
Helping evaluate the finalists was Chidi Asoluka, GED’22, founder and CEO of NewComm and a member of the program’s eighth cohort, exemplifying the cycle of alumni returning to support future innovators. Asoluka’s own venture began as a capstone project during his time in the program. Today, NewComm operates civic design studios that empower students to develop solutions to challenges facing their communities.
Returning as a judge was particularly meaningful, he said.
“When I was a student here, it was a critical moment in my life,” Asoluka said. “I really leveraged this space to launch my dreams. So it was a special thing to come back with that dream realized and help somebody else’s dream come true as well.”
The evening’s top honor went to Beske’s venture, Quantitative Reasoning with Data (QRD). A longtime mathematics educator and curriculum developer, Beske said the idea emerged through her curriculum work with school districts and from a belief that all students deserve meaningful mathematical learning experiences.
“Most people think it’s a wasted subject or it just scares them,” she said. “It shouldn’t, because mathematics is a universal language.”
The course integrates quantitative reasoning and data science into a single year-long experience that emphasizes real-world application and critical thinking. The venture is already moving beyond the pilot stage, with 35 public high schools in Denver scheduled to implement the curriculum beginning this August.
For Beske, winning the competition represented both a milestone and a reflection of how much she had grown throughout the program.
“I’ve been running a business, but really knew nothing about business,” she said. “That’s what EdEnt has been for me, the opportunity to really learn about business.”
The event also recognized seven members of the Global Impact Fellowship, a new selective program that provides additional mentorship and support for students working to launch and scale their ventures. Funded by alumna ChenXin Xu, GED’22, GRD’25, the fellowship pairs participants with entrepreneurship coach Roger Osorio, who works closely with fellows throughout the year, challenging students to move beyond planning and into implementation by launching prototypes and testing their ideas with real users. Two of this year’s pitch finalists, Beske and Huang, were also members of the fellowship program.
According to Osorio, the greatest obstacles entrepreneurs face are often not technical or academic, but psychological.
“It is scary as heck to say, ‘I’m going to test my idea with real people that I don’t know,’” he said. “But the moment you overcome that, everything changes.”
As the evening concluded, students celebrated the completion of an intensive year while preparing to join a growing international network of educators and entrepreneurs committed to transforming learning. For Program Director Jenny Zapf, that expanding community remains one of the program’s defining strengths.
“We’re incredibly grateful for all of our alums who come back and serve as advisors, as mentors, as champions of the program,” she said. “That’s what really makes the program real and innovative.”
Photos by HKB Photo.
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