Nearly 500 students packed Tisch Hall on Friday as entrepreneurs pitched startups, connected with fellow founders and explored the university’s startup scene at NYU’s 14th annual Entrepreneurs Festival.
Co-hosted by the NYU Entrepreneurial Institute and Stern’s Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship, the festival is a cornerstone of NYU’s startup community, drawing founders and aspiring entrepreneurs from across the university. Frank Rimalovski, the institute’s executive director, created the event to spotlight NYU’s entrepreneurial legacy.
“In my first year at NYU, I was asking around the university, and no one knew that Foursquare was started by Dennis Crowley, who went to Tisch, or that Twitter was started by Jack Dorsey, who went to CAS,” Rimalovski said in an interview with WSN. “I thought that we needed a way to really celebrate these founders, and the festival grew out of that idea.”
After opening remarks from Rimalovski and Berkley Center Associate Director Shay Gaskins, keynote speaker Denis Yarats — a Courant alum and co-founder of artificial intelligence search engine Perplexity — sat down with Clay Shirky, vice provost for AI and technology in education. Yarats’ company was valued at $20 billion last month, and he spoke on the AI industry’s rapid growth and building a startup in a competitive landscape.
When asked if they had used AI in the last 24 hours, nearly the entire audience raised their hands. After the discussion was opened up to students, they pressed Yarats about sustainability concerns and how aspiring founders should leverage the technology. He urged them to focus on “2027 and beyond,” and to use AI to accelerate growth.
“Imagine there’s two startups that do exactly the same thing,” Yarats told the audience. “One startup is writing code as they used to write code in 2022 and might initially grow faster, but over time the AI startup is going to overtake no matter what, because the cool thing about AI is that you can infinitely scale it.”
Following the keynote, a panel of three seniors and one recent graduate shared their experiences building startups while in school. The founders, working on ventures in industries ranging from insurance claims to sports analytics, discussed learning from feedback, why college is the ideal time to launch a company and strategies for finding co-founders.
Tandon graduate student Cherish Alston, who frequents the Leslie eLab — the Entrepreneurial Institute’s building on Washington Place — came to the festival seeking to learn from student experiences. She said that hearing from student founders was invaluable as she builds her own startup, Soleluxe, which sells jewelry accessories for sneakers.
“There’s nothing more inspiring than to see students that are currently working on their startups, but then also excelling in school as well,” Alston said. “It takes a very specific type of person to be able to do both, so to hear their story, hear their advice and see how they did it puts it all in perspective.”
During the networking hour, attendees explored a startup exhibition featuring companies from over a dozen founders, including Gallatin senior Dario Anaya, who founded educational platform Pupil and spoke on the earlier panel. Despite NYU ranking No. 8 on Fast Company’s 2025 list of the world’s most innovative schools last week, Anaya said the university’s entrepreneurial ecosystem deserves more recognition.
“NYU isn’t known for entrepreneurship as much as we should be,” Anaya said. “We’re more known for Tisch and Stern, which is more traditional business, and that is great, but there’s a lot of rich entrepreneurship at NYU. The Etsy founders, The Chainsmokers — who now have a venture capital fund — and a lot of other really cool companies came out of NYU. I’ve been able to get mentored by some of those founders, and all it took was a cold outreach email.”
The festival concluded with Demo Day, where teams from Stern Venture Fellows and the Entrepreneurial Institute’s Summer Launchpad program delivered three-minute pitches. Among the presenting companies were surgical technology startup Vitalis, women’s self-care program Thrive by Design and climate resilience marketplace Sheltrium.
As votes were tallied, the institute recognized Tisch alumni Yasser Ansari and Gabe Warshaw as the 2025 Mentors of the Year for returning to NYU to help student founders. The audience favorite trophy ultimately went to CAS alum Damiano Messineo for Loopini, a high-protein pizza line launching at Wegmans next month.
“Winning was incredible because I remember being a student and attending Demo Day,” Messineo told WSN. “Entrepreneurial energy is rejuvenating and energetic, and it was great to share this day with all the people passionate about entrepreneurship.”
Contact Krish Dev at [email protected].