Countless children grow up wanting to start a company like the billionaires on TV, change the world and get astronomically wealthy; the combination of creativity, resources and community at Tech can make that happen. An undeniable spark permeated the eyes of the over 250 students tabling the startups they had been working tirelessly on for 12 weeks at CREATE-X’s Demo Day event. Despite the sometimes overwhelming crowd of eager onlookers — and investors ready to sign checks — packing in the Exhibition Hall to seek inspiration from these student founders, the presenters stayed levelheaded, sharing their eye-opening startup stories and engaging their visitors.

CREATE-X, Tech’s startup accelerator program, empowers any student with a desire to be an entrepreneur to actually go out and do it. In its flagship Startup Launch program, students are given $5,000 in seed funding, $150,000 worth of in-kind services (legal, accounting, tax) and intense coaching to go from nothing to a full-blown startup over the course of 12 weeks. Today’s demo day was the program capstone, where founders share their startups with the world and its many customers, supporters and investors. 

The movement of people through one of the booth lanes came to a standstill as onlookers gathered around the table of defense startup Askari, a company whose mission is to build rapidly deployable drones to counter and destroy enemy attack drones. With two counterstrike drones set up on their table and a monitor displaying a video of their product in action, their story captivated visitors.

“Us founders all are GT, we met at Towers Residence Hall in freshman year,” reminisced Askari co-founder Robert Van Zyl, ME ‘23. “The biggest thing we’ve got from CREATE-X is the people. It’s enabled us to get this idea off the ground.” 

A huge variety of ideas were demonstrated from biochemical clones for urine testing to an AI Taekwondo tutor. 

“The most exciting thing is to see what students are continually working on and to watch them evolve, where they take an idea that could be simple and build venture-backed, impactable and generation impactable structures,” said Rahul Saxena ME ’97, Director of CREATE-X, on why he was excited to organize Demo Day each year in the seven years he has worked with the program.

“The biggest impact on students I’ve seen is being able to have that entrepreneurial mindset to define problems, understand how problems work and then build solutions that are practical,” Saxena reflected. “This thinking is important not only in startups but when working for companies as well.” 

Some CREATE-X student startups, like Sean Henry’s, BA ’19, logistics technology company Stord, go on to be worth over a billion dollars. Saxena offered some advice for those who are interested in becoming entrepreneurs but are hesitant or perhaps scared to start.

“The goal of CREATE-X is to give you as many pathways as possible to try entrepreneurship before students graduate. The program gives you many options to start. You can start small with the Startup Lab class, a class to begin the ideation process of a startup, then progress into a different class (Idea-to-Prototype) where you can build a prototype and finally launch a company with Startup Launch. It doesn’t matter where you start, just start,” Saxena said.

Once the presenters on demo day started, the momentum did not stop. As the booths wound down and conversations between founders, students, investors and general guests lingered, it became clear that students weren’t just demoing their projects today. This event and the CREATE-X program were the start of many profound ventures with the potential to change industries, communities and perhaps even the world. 

To get a start yourself, check out the CREATE-X Demo Day page to learn more about each startup being demoed and the various pathways to begin your entrepreneurship journey here at Tech: create-x.gatech.edu/2025-demo-day