Cozad Profile | Chaitanya Gulati

Welcome to the Technology Entrepreneurship Center’s new blog, Voyages! We are very excited to present you with informative and interesting articles about entrepreneurship efforts in the Champaign-Urbana ecosystem. For our first story, we interviewed U of I student entrepreneur Chaitanya Gulati about his venture NASADYA and experience participating in the TEC’s Cozad New Venture Challenge, a business venture creation competition. 

Can you tell us about your startup? How did you come up with the idea?
Our team is working on a device to convert excess electricity from power plants into profitable co-products like hydrogen and oxygen, and our startup is called NASADYA. I grew up in India and I saw what a lack of access to energy can do. I was really focused on finding something in that space that can help people because I feel in the future we really need to ensure everyone will at least have access to energy. Reading a lot about this issue, I came across the excess energy problem and felt that it  was a perfect problem to start with, to work towards solving the entire issue.  As we speak, the world is transitioning from a fossil fuel based energy system to a more renewable energy system, and what we're trying to do makes it very relevant.

Tell us about your team. How was your team formed? 
I have a team of about eight people. My first teammate is actually from UChicago. I was in this program called Startup City Scholars, through Grainger Engineering, and I spent a semester at UChicago, and I was participating in the College New Venture Challenge there. It was in this program that I came across my teammate in a pitching session. A few others I got on board through SocialFuse, a recurring pitching and networking event by TEC, and there were a couple who joined from NOBE (National Organization for Business and Engineering). NOBE was actually consulting for my startup last semester and this semester as well, and one of the consultants there reached out to his friend and he was like, well you should you should speak to these guys. He reached out to us and now he’s our product lead!

What did you hope to get out of Cozad?
Our goal was to get a prize to focus on our own product development. Unfortunately though Cozad didn't go as well for us as we were hoping it would. This semester we are also participating in the MIT Clean Energy Prize and Rice Business Plan Semi Finals. We ended up focusing a lot on that and our pitch for Cozad, I would say, wasn't as refined as I would have liked it to be. I put in a lot of time but I feel I could have practiced the pitch a little more. I first participated in Cozad back in freshman year, so I've been in this program for a while. Even last year when it got called off in the middle because of COVID I was still participating in that because I feel it's a really valuable experience and a lot comes out of Cozad.

Which events from Cozad did you most enjoy this year?
I think it was great that they made everything virtual in terms of the content. It was really helpful to be able to go back to specific things on Compass to view and learn.
Apart from that, you know, I really got a lot of value out of the semi-finals pitch. Essentially, that didn't go too well for me, and it was a very good check. I've been pitching for a while, and it's not something I find really hard in the sense that I’m not scared of it. Still, messing up a pitch after a while was good for me to realize, “Okay, I need to be putting in more time into this specific section”,  so that process really helped me. I personally enjoyed everything, and in the mentor session, especially, I got a lot of feedback on my pitch deck and judges helped me review a lot of stuff so that was really good.

Where do you see this venture going after Cozad? What next?
As I said we’ll be participating in the MIT Clean Energy Prize and Rice Business Plan, and we’re also currently in the iVenture Accelerator, so our goal is essentially to do well in those two programs, get some money to build a product. We still want to keep trying to find opportunities that can help us work on the product. We hope to find an incubator, build the product, and try to find partnerships and funding opportunities as well, to get a pilot and launch an MVP (minimum viable product) by the end of this year or early next year.

If you could meet with one famous entrepreneur who would it be and why?
I think I would love to meet Elon Musk, because I feel like his entire approach on a product and getting something out is very interesting. Also, entering a very, very hard market takes a lot of thinking and a lot of work, and I want to know what his thought process was and how he tackled it. Learning and knowing all of that would really, really revolutionize my own journey, and I would change a lot of things about me using those lessons that he had and the processes he went through.

Any parting tips for aspiring entrepreneurs and future Cozad participants?
I would tell everyone on campus that they need to really be heavily involved in the ecosystem; there are a lot of mentors who really help you get to places that can be immensely valuable for your startup and for you. My advice would be that the most important thing in entrepreneurship, in my experience, has been the ability to persevere through tough times because, as an entrepreneur, you know, throughout, you'll have various experiences with a lot of uncertainties. One week everything is going great and the next week you’ll think it’s all over. I think it's in those times that you really need to power through for your team and for yourself, and just don't get disheartened by smaller losses in the process.

I’d like to thank Chaitanya for taking the time to talk to us, and wish him the best of luck in the future. With that our inaugural article for Voyages comes to a wrap!

Deepak Moparthi is a junior in Computer Science in Grainger Engineering, and is a member of the Technology Entrepreneur Center Student Advisory Board.