The Grainger College of Engineering
Technology Entrepreneur Center

Innovation LLC

Located in the Illinois Street Residence Halls, Innovation Living-Learning Community (LLC) provides you with resources that can help to make your creative and entrepreneurial dreams a reality. The program includes on-site classes and workshops with faculty and area business leaders revolving around the themes of creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship. The Garage, a dedicated workspace within the community, is available for use by residents as they develop their new businesses and projects. On-site staff members are also available to assist residents as they navigate the ample entrepreneurial and creative resources on the University of Illinois campus and within the Champaign-Urbana community.

The Innovation LLC’s mission is to allow students to explore the entrepreneurial process and to give students the resources to further develop their ideas. Whatever your major, Innovation LLC can help you:

  • Locate key resources on-campus and in the community to make your ideas a reality (mentors, funding, etc.)
  • Generate ideas and assess opportunities and goals
  • Expand your creativity and participate in positive risk taking
  • Broaden your entrepreneurial awareness
  • Connect with other students who share similar interests in innovation, technology, creativity, and entrepreneurship

Created as a partnership between University Housing and the Technology Entrepreneur Center (TEC), Innovation LLC staff actively connect students with the many opportunities that are available through TEC, including competitions, workshops, and events.

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2025–26 Innovation LLC Highlights

This 2025–26 academic year, the Innovation LLC—in partnership with the Technology Entrepreneur Center (soon to be the Landuyt Entrepreneurship Center)—saw remarkable achievements from both current students and alumni. Thanks to support from ILLC alum and entrepreneur Matt Gornick, a record 13 Innovation Microgrants were awarded, with 7 recipients advancing to the 2026 Cozad New Venture Challenge Demo Day.

Congratulations to all this year’s microgrant recipients and Cozad contestants!

     • Student Spotlight: e-NABLE Prosthetics UIUC

2025 microgrant recipient Yulia Kohut and her team, e-NABLE, began with a $300 microgrant to 3D print prosthetic limb prototypes. In less than a year, they achieved official status as a University of Illinois RSO.

In their own words:
e-NABLE Prosthetics UIUC is a new engineering RSO on campus. We’re focused on 3D design and fabrication of hand prosthetics and we are a chapter of e-NABLE nonprofit organization that connects design volunteers like us with children that need a low-cost prosthetic around the world. We're looking for students passionate about design and raising disability awareness.

Congratulations to Yulia and the e-NABLE team!

     • Alumni Spotlight: ChatOverflow

Former Innovation LLC member and Program Assistant, Ansh Tulsyan, along with his teammate, Ishaan Chamoli, have significantly advanced their start-up, ChatOverflow, over the past two years.

In Ansh’s words:
ChatOverflow is a shared knowledge layer for AI agents built by Ansh Tulsyan and Ishaan Chamoli. When agents get stuck, they either go through extensive trial and error or require human intervention to produce good results. But the knowledge gained in that process is lost after the run or isolated to a single agent. The same pattern plays out inside companies with collective human knowledge that exists—but with no one way to surface what's actually important in the moment it's needed. ChatOverflow lets agents post their learnings on a public platform for other agents to instantly search and reuse instead of starting from scratch. We’re building the layer that makes accumulated knowledge accessible across agents, large teams, and eventually across the world.

We’ve raised our pre-seed round with one of the strongest accelerators, and are relocating to SF to build our startup full time. We're working with hundreds of developers and select large enterprises to figure out where this matters most.

Congratulations to Ansh and Ishaan on this amazing achievement! We wish you all the best and offer our continued support as your project progresses.