Helping Boston College Entrepreneurs Soar 

In the nearly four decades since he graduated from BC, Peter Bell ’86, P’20, P’25 has been an entrepreneur, a CEO, a college professor, and a BC trustee. But most consistently, he’s been a venture capitalist, helping entrepreneurs grow their crazy ideas into successful companies. Back in the summer of 2011, one of those young entrepreneurs was Tom Coburn ’13, a rising junior at BC. Coburn caught Bell’s attention when he won the Boston College Venture Competition with his idea for a software company, called Jebbit, that allowed companies to gather data about their customers through interactive methods like quizzes.

Intrigued, Bell offered Coburn the use of his office that summer as a place to continue to workshop the idea. Jebbit went on to become a juggernaut in the digital marketing space, and Coburn ultimately dropped out of BC to run it full-time. Coburn and Bell stayed in touch, however, and in 2014, Coburn approached Bell with an idea for an organization in which Eagle alumni could help younger BC entrepreneurs by investing money, experience, and mentorship into their new companies. Thus was born Soaring Startup Circle, or SSC, which eventually evolved from a nonprofit into a venture capital fund. “The whole mission has been around embracing, strengthening, and helping the BC entrepreneurial community,” Bell said.

In three rounds of funding to date, the SSC has raised and invested in excess of $5 million into more than sixty-eight  companies founded by BC alumni. But money is just the beginning of the support the fund offers the entrepreneurs it works with. SSC’s 150 BC alumni mentors—lawyers, business executives, accountants, and other professionals—provide free advice to the founders in the network. Additionally, every summer the SSC selects a few promising new company founders, gives them $10,000 to refine their startup ideas, and brings them all together for a twelve-week program featuring workshops, one-on-one coaching, and guest speakers.

Today, SSC has four general partners: Bell, Coburn, Christina Quinn ’13, who is the founder and managing partner of Lua LLC, and Duncan Walker ’13, a Jebbit cofounder who is the CTO at Heard Inc. The team also includes three venture partners.When it comes to finding the next great entrepreneur, Bell said, “experience is overrated. If you look at the companies you use every day, most were started by people in their twenties. We meet people really early and help them before it’s obvious. That’s why it works.”

Many SSC-backed companies have found success, such as the real estate software company Aryeo, which Zillow acquired in 2023 for $35 million; Moolah Kicks, a women’s basketball sneaker brand beloved by WNBA players; and Beam, the vitamin brand promoted by celebrities like former Olympic gymnast Shawn Johnson. SSC uses what’s known as a two and twenty fee structure. That means that when one of their companies is sold, goes public, or exits the fund for some other reason, 80 percent of SSC profits go to investors, and the other 20 percent, plus a 2 percent fee, goes to the partners that manage the fund. “If you’re an investor and you don’t get a good rate of return, you’re not going to keep investing,” Bell said. “This is not a donation, we’re investing in people.”

SSC was deliberately established to be separate from Boston College, Bell said, because the fund simply cannot invest in every alum’s idea, a reality that might place the University in a difficult position. When deciding whether to invest in a company, Bell said the fund looks for “the five Ms”—the company’s market, management team, business model, momentum, and magic. Of the nearly seventy companies that SSC has invested in, thirteen have entirely women leadership teams or a sole founder who is a woman, twenty-two have at least one female founder, and half have a founder with an identity that is traditionally underrepresented in venture capital. In the broader industry, Quinn said, nearly 84 percent of global venture capital investments in 2024 went to companies with entirely male founding teams. SSC has an application form on its website that founders can fill out to connect, but Quinn said that most of the fund’s investments do not originate with an elevator pitch. “I think the best way to get an investment from someone is to focus on building a human relationship,” she said, “because at the end of the day, investors are people.” Below, you’ll learn more about SSC and some of the companies it has invested in.

Trevor Rozier-Byrd ’05 was disillusioned with corporate America. It was 2019 and Rozier-Byrd was working at a financial services company, feeling disappointed that there appeared to be so little effort in his sector to address the economic challenges faced by many communities of color. “Here I was at one of the largest financial institutions in the world,” he said, “and we were having these conversations as if we didn’t know how to solve for issues of the racial wealth gap, financial access, and inclusion.” So he came up with a plan. He would use the skills he’d developed as a corporate transactional lawyer and director of strategy and business development to help financially empower people. “I decided I wanted to be part of the solution,” he said. His career in finance had illuminated three pathways to building wealth: owning real estate, owning a business, and investing in the stock market. Because a much smaller percentage of Black families are invested in the stock market than White families, he decided that the best way to help was to teach people how to invest. He got to work building an app to do just that. He began asking for help from friends in finance, law, and startups, and for months, he would stay up until 3 a.m. to refine his business plan. In 2020, he launched Stackwell, an app that simplifies investing by automatically investing money that users deposit. The app also automatically rebalances portfolios to keep them in tune with investors’ financial goals. Stackwell, a for-profit company, charges a $5 monthly subscription, keeping the service accessible to low-income users, and does not charge fees to users for assets under its management. Stackwell further distinguishes itself from other investment platforms by including articles about finance. Rozier-Byrd met the SSC partners through connections from BC, and he ultimately received two investments from the fund. Today, Stackwell has seven full-time employees and more than thirty thousand users, many of them generated through partnerships with historically Black colleges and universities, and with other institutions that serve minority communities. Stackwell partner organizations pay for participants to access the app and provide seed money for them to invest in the market. In one program, for instance, Stackwell runs on-campus investment workshops and gives students their first $1,000 to invest, all of it made possible through $1.65 million in grant funding from The Prudential Foundation and other philanthropic organizations. “We’re showing up and saying, we see you, and we have this unwavering belief in your upward mobility and potential,” Rozier-Byrd said.

By the time she graduated from BC, Bailey Renger ’22 had interned at NASA, worked on quantum computing at Harvard, and been accepted to a PhD program at Brown, but it was a personal medical experience that inspired her to launch her startup, BeSound Breast Health. The company provides women with easy access to advanced ultrasounds that use AI technology to scan for breast cancer. BeSound was formally founded last year by Renger, who is CEO, and John Stanco ’18, the company’s chief technology officer, but it began as a concept five years ago, when Renger began experiencing pelvic pain. An ultrasound at the time revealed a tumor on her ovaries, but could not determine whether it was cancerous. As she spent months fighting with her insurance company to cover the cost of further imaging, Renger was struck by the contrast between the ready availability of the advanced technology she was using in her research and the struggle for access to other technology that could provide answers about her health. “We can see to the edge of the universe, literally, but it’s so difficult to see two and a half centimeters into the human body,” she said. “It’s not a physics or even a technology problem, it’s an access problem.” In 2022, Renger participated in the SSC Summer Accelerator program before heading off to pursue her doctorate at Brown. During the twelve-week program, she began building BeSound and soon dropped out of Brown to pursue it full-time. This fall the company will open its first clinic in Los Angeles, where it will provide the advanced scans, which can quickly and accurately determine whether a lesion is a malignant tumor, a cyst, or something else. BeSound plans to open clinics nationwide in the coming months via partnerships with diagnostic companies. Women can use the BeSound app to sign up for scans, which cost about $350, and then to view their results. “It’s diagnostic imaging that can reduce unnecessary biopsies,” Renger said. “It’s really empowering for women to have more answers at the point of getting a scan or shortly after.” Today, Renger herself is in good health, but she makes sure to get follow-up scans every six months. “What I find really motivating is 99 percent of breast cancers when they’re detected early are survivable,” Renger said. “It’s really exciting to see those statistics and be able to provide a solution to women because it’s the closest thing we have to a cure.”

Branick Weix ’19 had a relatively unusual job in high school. Rather than flip burgers or bag groceries, Weix worked as a real estate photographer, getting paid to use a drone to take aerial photos that agents used to market properties. The gig taught him about the administrative challenges professional photographers face with things like payroll, scheduling, and digitally storing all the photos they take. Out of those challenges came Weix’s concept for Aryeo, the company he cofounded in his dorm room during his sophomore year. The software platform automates many of the administrative tasks required of professional photographers.

As a sophomore at BC, Weix got to know SSC general partner Tom Coburn ’13 while enrolled in TechTrek, a popular course that allows students to meet with entrepreneurs. Coburn was one of the alumni who encouraged Weix’s ambitions to launch Aryeo, and together with TechTrek Professor John Gallaugher and Shea Center for Entrepreneurship Director Jere Doyle, helped teach him everything from how to create his first pitch deck to how to fundraise. In 2018, Weix won BC’s Strakosch Venture Competition with his pitch for Aryeo, which gave him $15,000 to continue building the company. BC also provided him with office space to work on the idea, and he spent hours cold-calling dozens of local photographers asking them to try his software. From there, the company experienced meteoric growth. After SSC became one of Aryeo’s earliest investors, in 2019, the company hired its first employee in 2020. By 2023, more than 10 percent of all real estate transactions in the country were being processed through its software. One regular customer was the powerhouse real estate website Zillow, which ended up buying Aryeo that same year for $35 million. Weix was twenty-six. “It’s a little like you don’t know how to wrap your head around it,” Weix said. “It was extremely gratifying.” He continued working for Zillow as Aryeo CEO until 2024. He’s now in the early days of building his second startup, which SSC has already invested in. Weix also serves as an SSC mentor, usually focused on advising the network’s young entrepreneurs who work in software. “You see these people go start their own companies and you never know how it’s going to come back around,” he said. “I love to help people go build more things out in the world.”

When Bo Brainerd ’25 was a junior at BC, she found herself fed up with modern dating. At social events on the weekends, people weren’t approaching each other. Things were a little better on the dating apps, where she had plenty of matches, but her conversations rarely led to dates. What was needed, she decided, was a dating app that didn’t just connect people, but actually helped facilitate their first meeting. So Brainerd came up with the idea for Ophelia, a dating app that would match couples and then plan their date. Brainerd’s concept won the 2023 Start@Shea Elevator Pitch Competition, an annual student startup competition run by BC’s Carroll School of Management. It then placed second in BC’s Strakosch Venture Competition. Impressed, SSC general partner Christina Quinn ’13 recommended that Brainerd apply for the 2024 SSC Summer Accelerator, in which a few new entrepreneurs are selected to attend an intensive twelve-week startup training course and provided with mentorship and $10,000 to develop their business. The program helped Brainerd refine her concept for Ophelia. Today, the platform no longer connects people. Instead, users must already have someone they want to go on a date with and answer a few questions about their interests. (Would they rather attend a sports game or walk around a museum?) The app then curates a date itinerary for them using a database of Ophelia’s local business partners—everything from pottery studios to gaming arcades—and charges a fee equal to 10 percent of the total cost of the date. There are also options for creating your own itinerary. Brainerd said SSC has helped her immensely. In addition to the investment she received, she’s also learned how to code and build her website from the fund’s mentors. “I owe my entire metamorphosis from founder to entrepreneur to SSC,” she said.  When Ophelia officially launched in September, it already had more than five thousand users on its waiting list. The app is only available in Boston for now, but Brainerd hopes to expand to New York City by the end of this year. “People ask me, ‘what’s the end goal?’” Brainerd said. “I’m like, I just want people to be happy and in love.”

Back in 2017, when Dave Nguyen JD’06, MSF’08 and Eunice Byun were living in New York City, the two friends made a pact that would change their lives: to stop eating so much takeout. As they started cooking more and ordering less, they noticed a hole in the market for kitchen tools. “There was a lot of stuff that was really expensive at specialty stores, like a $300 chef’s knife that was way too intimidating for us,” Nguyen said. “The alternative was a $20 knife that didn’t feel well-designed or good quality.” Nguyen, who was then director of retail planning at Chanel, and Byun, vice president of global digital marketing at Revlon, saw an opportunity. Together, they drew on their corporate experience to start Material Kitchen, a purveyor of affordable, high-end kitchenware ranging from pans and whisks to ice cream scoops and cloth dinner napkins. After hearing about SSC, Nguyen reached out to SSC general partner Peter Bell ’86 and was able to secure an investment from the fund in 2023. Today, Material Kitchen products are sold in retailers like Bloomingdale’s and The Container Store. The company has been featured in national publications such as Vogue, Bon Appétit, and New York Magazine, and has nearly one hundred thousand social media followers. SSC provided the growing company with financial support, of course, but “I had also been looking for ways to become more active in the BC community and thought that this could be a way to do so,” Nguyen said. He’s an active participant in the SSC Slack group, regularly answering business questions from other entrepreneurs in SSC portfolio companies; volunteers at SSC events for BC students; and last semester acted as a mentor in the University’s Accelerate@Shea entrepreneur program. Looking ahead, he and Byun hope to one day open a brick-and-mortar store. They also plan to continue using sustainable materials in their products, including a microplastic-free cutting board and a salad bowl made from recycled plastic and renewable sugarcane.

When Dan Brett ’18 entered the SSC Summer Accelerator program back in 2020, he and his cofounder, Robert Harrington ’18, had an idea for a meal kit delivery service. It wasn’t long, though, before Brett and Harrington realized that the whole thing wasn’t viable. So to bring in extra money, they started delivering Christmas trees dressed as Santa,  unexpectedly making national headlines and enough income to fund a new idea for a company called Dryfter. Today, the company owns and operates a network of Vermont vacation homes outfitted specifically for large group events like bachelor parties, work retreats, and weddings. Dryfter’s houses, which are each large enough to sleep more than a dozen people, are equipped with amenities like golf simulators, poker tables, saunas, and pickleball courts. The idea was inspired by customer frustrations with property-rental companies like Airbnb. “We just kept hearing from people over and over again that the experience wasn’t great,” said Brett, who is Dryfter’s CEO. (Harrington has since left the company). “The hosts weren’t responsive, there were ridiculous fees, and it wasn’t great for large groups. So our original concept was, we can do this better.” What sets Dryfter apart from its competitors?  Primarily, it’s that the company owns all of its properties. After a successful eight-month pilot program using rented homes, Dryfter raised enough capital in 2022 to purchase its first home, and has since acquired four more. The company continues to benefit from its association with SSC. It found some of its biggest investors through SSC connections, and Brett sends out monthly emails to SSC members, sometimes with questions about business matters, like how to monetize Dryfter’s social media following, which has ballooned to nearly one million people. Dryfter promotes a “hyper fixation on hospitality” among the company’s small team of twelve part-time employees. All guest messages, for instance, are answered within five minutes. “It’s all completely in-house,” he said, “which leads to a much better guest experience.”

As a successful tech executive,  Jason Krantz ’95, P’23 is more than just an SSC investor, he’s also one of the fund’s 150 alumni mentors, a network of professionals including lawyers, business executives, and accountants who give free advice to entrepreneurs associated with SSC. Krantz is the founder and executive chairman of Definitive Healthcare, a technology company that generated more than $252 million in revenue last year. But despite his success, memories of founding his first company as an inexperienced twentysomething have never left him and inform his mentorship of SSC’s young entrepreneurs. “It’s really looking at, what are my battle scars? What are the things I’d do differently if I could go back in time?” Krantz said of his approach. “It’s about trying to teach those lessons to allow them to scale quicker, make fewer mistakes, and achieve all their goals.” Access to mentors such as Krantz is one of the most valuable benefits for the handful of young entrepreneurs who are accepted into SSC’s Summer Accelerator program each year. During the program, the participants receive one-on-one coaching from mentors with experience in related industries. The mentors also deliver talks during the program, covering such important topics as what to look for in hiring early employees, how to sell a product as it’s being made, how to get products to market quickly, and how to rapidly innovate. Krantz’s biggest piece of advice for young entrepreneurs? Just go for it. “Worst case scenario, you give this a whirl for a couple of years and the stars don’t align,” he said. “But the amount you learn and the value you have to the next startup or employer goes up dramatically.” ◽