Joining Forces for Founders: How the University of Michigan’s Impact Studio and Center for Entrepreneurship Work to Support Start-Ups

The University of Michigan is home to the leaders and the best across all fields, and our startup and venture ecosystem is no exception to this rule. Bold students across many schools, from the College of Literature, Sciences, and Arts to the School of Information, have stepped up to the plate as entrepreneurs in order to make their visionary ideas reality.

However, the idea of starting up a business can be more glamorous than the actual nitty-gritty of early mornings for pitch competitions, meetings to secure funding, and late nights working with your founder team to hash out your minimum viable product. It’s an intensive research and development process from start to finish, whether you’re diving into financial analysis or conducting customer discovery. There is an immense roster of tasks to complete and a vast amount of knowledge to attain, which can all combine to make venture creation an incredibly overwhelming undertaking.

This is where the Ross School of Business’s Impact Studio and the College of Engineering’s Center for Entrepreneurship (CFE) step in. This year’s Impact Studio cohort can attest to the fact of how the Impact Studio and CFE each offer a unique set of resources to students looking to get their ventures off the ground, and when combined, they are a powerful tool for success.

The Center of Entrepreneurship made an appearance at the Impact Studio’s Kickoff, indicating the strength of this relationship early on in the academic year

“They [CFE] were the first people to get this validation that… we had come up with an idea that was worth investing our time into,” said Rebecca Lentz (PhD ‘26), a founder of Puffin Air Purifiers, in reference to Fuel, a CFE funding program that supports student innovation with monthly awards of up to $25,000. “When we pitched, they were so excited about our idea that they upped us to $1,000 … And that was the first step. That was the amount of money that we needed to get rolling.”

To keep up that momentum, though, Lentz and her co-founder Rachel Silcox (PhD ’26) turned to the Impact Studio Incubator, which offers a long-term structured ecosystem where Founders are connected with experts in a variety of functions they can tap into to solidify their business. Co-founder of Pachira Rishab Gupta (BS ’26) had a similar experience as Lentz and Silcox. “The Impact Studio gives you … those resources, the motivation, connects you with CFE and other resources,” he explains. Gupta mentioned how “every week, we have a new speaker who you can connect with and get resources from.”

Siddhant Makkar (MS ‘26), a founder of SolStove, brought up the Applebaum Impact Design Fellows as a fantastic resource to draw on as well. They’ve “basically been part of our team,” he says.

Applebaum Impact Design Fellow Aaron Brodkey works with Founder Rishab Gupta on Pachira, a Tech for Good venture in this semester’s cohort

The connection between the two initiatives isn’t just a progressive pipeline from Fuel to the Incubator, though, but a relationship that continually builds upon knowledge for all parties involved. Alexander Arda Cetinel (MSI ‘27), founder of Helping Hand AI, mentioned that, without his time in iCorps, an entrepreneurship program through CFE, he would not have “felt like he was on the same level of entrepreneurship as the other members.”

“There’s symbiosis between the two,” Cetinel stated.

Makkar agrees with that sentiment. His entire founder team is in CFE’s Entrepreneurial Leadership Program (ELP), an educational experience designed for a select group of students combining experiential learning with coaching. Going through the Impact Studio now, Makkar sees a lot of cohesiveness between it and the CFE. “[The] timeline is pretty similar. … We’re doing customer discovery and synthesizing the data and prototyping … it’s lined up very well and we’re kind of using them [ELP and the Impact Studio] together as kind of support and resources as we’re trying to start this and pull this,” he elaborated.

Cetinel goes further, saying that there is a shared sentiment and perspective of “getting your hands dirty and … validating those key assumptions” in order to solve for customers rather than being everything to everybody. In fact, he remembers a time where he was given the same advice by mentors in iCorps and his Impact Studio coach to not try to “boil an ocean” when you have a BIC lighter instead of an industrial grade flamethrower.

Coach David Tarver supports Founder Sunny Huang (MBA ’26 and MPP ’26) with her Indigenous Land Back Movement venture, Sinnoya Hope Farm Initiative

It’s not just on the founder end that the benefits of this partnership are seen though. “From an instructor standpoint, the involvement with the Impact Studio has helped inform my work with CFE,” says David Tarver, a coach at the Impact Studio who teaches courses for CFE. Each program is housed at a different school (CFE at Engineering and the Impact Studio at Ross), but is open to any major and is thus home to a vast amount of intellectual wealth and innovative spark, a hub for trading ideas and guidance. “You have talented entrepreneurs there [CFE] who want to do things, but that impact connection [is something that] they get from coming over here [the Impact Studio]. So I think it’s a good blend. It’s a good pipeline for people to go through.”

Ultimately, both the Impact Studio and CFE are guided by a shared mission of cultivating entrepreneurs and business ideas to be the very best they can be through iterative feedback processes, close bonds within startup communities, and chances to constantly push boundaries of what one knows and can do. In the words of Makkar, when you’re equipped with these amazing resources, “you’re not doing [all of this] alone. You have a bunch of opportunities.” The University of Michigan is home to a support system filled with people who have been in your shoes before and are eager to help out. All it takes is a willingness to take advantage of those opportunities.