Innovation Scholars Prepare To Forge New Paths – News – Carnegie Mellon University

The Swartz Center has put many Innovation Scholars on the path to starting their own companies.

Matt Spettel, the CEO of DeltaTrainer, was an Innovation Scholar majoring in electrical and computer engineering. He began working on DeltaTrainer his junior year, and now post-graduation the startup is his full-time career. It started as an idea for a hardware device that could track strength training repetitions in a gym environment. It has evolved into a remote personal training technology that uses data from wearables to automatically track exercises, feeding that data back to real personal trainer.

Spettel’s mentor through the program was Matt Rogers, Nest Labs co-founder and CMU alumnus, who became an investor in DeltaTrainer.

2021 Innovation Scholars Aaron Lebel and Paris Mielke co-founded Pairi Inc., an e-commerce platform for service-based businesses. Pairi was accepted into Techstars Chicago Class of 2020, receiving a $120,000 investment.

“The Innovation Scholars Program was a great first step to getting to know other CMU founders,” said Lebel, the CTO for Pairi. “There’s not another program in the school like that that can connect you to people with really diverse backgrounds across the university. It was definitely the single highest ROI (return on investment) thing I did at the university.”