This summer, 77 founders from across New Jersey enrolled in the 2026 Uplift Mentorship Program, our largest yet, with five cohorts running at once. By the end of the program, founders and mentors had logged more than 8,000 minutes of one-on-one mentorship. Every one of those minutes was a real conversation between a founder and someone who has been where they’re trying to go.
Who Builds in New Jersey
Roughly a third of this year’s cohort is building AI-native products, from agentic security platforms to education intelligence tools. About one in five is working in health and life sciences. The rest stretch across fintech, ed tech, consumer goods, clean energy, and services.
A few of them: Gifty Anane is opening the first-ever laundromat in Princeton after a change to historic bylaws made it possible. Evan Peneiras, a Rutgers medical student, is building smart glasses for glaucoma patients at Nooriva. Rajesh Ivaturi, a former Citibank CISO, is building the agentic penetration-testing platform SekurAI. Engineers, clinicians, students, veterans, and professors, all in the same rooms every week.
The Companies in the Room
The cohort ranged from first-time founders still shaping an idea to companies with paying customers. Sharon Joseph’s CREWASIS counts national consumer brands among its enterprise customers. Logan Jones’s ticker has more than 800 users and $4.7M in connected brokerage assets. Lianna LaRiccia’s autism data platform grew out of a Stevens capstone and is now her full-time company. Several founders spent the summer preparing to raise for the first time.
How the Program Worked
Every founder was matched one-on-one with a mentor based on their stage and industry. Mentors included repeat founders, angel investors, and operators at companies like Lockheed Martin, Infobip, and Verizon.
From there, the summer followed a steady rhythm. Cohorts came together for educational sessions and gatherings, and founders met with their mentors one-on-one in between. Every mentorship session was logged and verified with signed forms, so the 8,000 minutes are a record, not a guess. Of the 77 founders who enrolled, 47 completed the full mentorship program.
The matching is the part we sweat the most, and the founders noticed.
> “I was looking for someone who had go-to-market experience to help with our commercial launch, and Uplift matched me with someone who did exactly that.”
> Dr. Rachel Hayes, Ravel Genetics
> “My biggest takeaway was the power of earned media and PR. My mentor is like a guru in PR and earned media, and that was something I was hoping to get out of this, so it was a great pairing.”
> Logan Jones, ticker
For founders at the earliest stage, the value showed up differently. Jeremy Ruiz Villavicencio came into the summer with an idea for Menti, connecting first-generation high school students with college students, and left knowing how to move on it. “Without my mentor, I wouldn’t have known what to do, or even know the first step to take after just having an idea,” he said. Priyal Levine of Wisdom & Wonder Wellness put it another way: “I may have had a limit to where my potential was at, and then mentorship broke it.”
The Summit: Celebration Day
On August 4, the whole Uplift community gathered at the Antique Lofts in Hoboken to close out the program. Three founders took the stage for a live pitch showcase, each with five minutes to pitch and five of audience Q&A:
- Rachel Hayes, Ravel Genetics, a preventive health intelligence platform built on whole-genome sequencing and systems biology
- Sharon Joseph, CREWASIS, an AI-powered decision intelligence platform that compresses consumer brand planning from a year into weeks
- Logan Jones, ticker, a free social investing app where users share verified trades, built to close the investing hesitation gap
The audience voted, and the Audience Choice Award went to Logan Jones and ticker.
Uplift exists because New Jersey invests in its founders, and that investment showed up on stage too. The New Jersey Economic Development Authority, one of the program’s supporters, joined us to walk the cohort through what the state’s newest policies mean for them. As of January 1, New Jersey recognizes QSBS at the state level, making the first $15M in capital gains on a qualifying exit potentially tax-free. The Angel Investor Tax Credit also rose from 20% to 35%, or 40% for minority- and women-owned businesses, and the credit is refundable. For founders who will be raising in the next year, New Jersey is a meaningfully better place to build than it was twelve months ago.
Then we celebrated the 2026 cohort, and the mentors who gave them their summer.
Beyond the Program
Congratulations to the 2026 founders, and thank you to every mentor who showed up for them. The relationships built this summer are the whole point, and they don’t end at the Summit. James Curley, who co-founded My Behavior Bridge with Lianna LaRiccia, described what he found in the cohort: “All you have to do is reach out and meet with people and find new avenues, new opportunities to get your startup going, and find people to support you.”
You’ll find the Uplift community at our upcoming events, including AI Demo Nights each month and the OverdriveAI Summit in October.
Congratulations to the 2026 Cohort
The founders: Abhaya Pawar (Ilika), Adeola Adeoye-Davids (Local Window), Alisha Sharma, Aliya Laliwala (Campus Marketplace), Angela Aricatt (Get Empathix), Annalyce D’Agostino-Gavin (Focus Posters), Anthony Caruso (Contextral), Bejan Moers (United Solution), Chandni Patel, Chirag Shah (Crestwood Digital), Daniel Patton (DreamEngine AI), Debbie Douglas (3DHR Consulting), Ekaterina Kashkina (stealth-mode molecular diagnostics startup), Elaf Mahmoud (Elune Health), Eliana Zebro (Freelance Audio), Elisa Charters (Juegos AI Lab), Evan Peneiras (Nooriva), Gifty Anane (Wash Lodge), Gunjan Aggarwal (Virre), Hamza Zafar (HHALI), Harshil Thakkar, James Curley and Lianna LaRiccia (My Behavior Bridge), Jean Guerdy Paul (TETHRRA), Jeremy Ruiz Villavicencio (Menti), Jhamar Youngblood (Brickcity), Jordan-River Samuel (tapyoca), Kevin Navarro (MechSense Labs), Kima D’Anjou (The Keenly Group), Lina Escobar (Sweet Aurora Soap & Candle), Logan Jones (ticker), Natalie Kitts (The Zigzag Flow), Nina Mladenovski (Zenia Graph), Paula Machado Jackler (Ozzie), Pearl Gabel, Pierre Girgis (Veriflo), Priyal Levine (Wisdom & Wonder Wellness), Rachel Hayes (Ravel Genetics), Radha Ratnala (Rekogni AI), Rajesh Ivaturi (SekurAI), Sarah Inoue (Crafty Dessert), Shanthi Viswanathan (Infivista), Sharon Joseph (CREWASIS), Shell Bobev (Disrupt The Gap), Sonali Chilupuri (Recky Solutions), Stephanie Scott-Bradshaw (First and Last PR), and Tosca Marleen (Tend to Belle).
And the mentors who gave them their summer: Aditi Sinha (MarketCast), Aizaz Shariff (Stratsphere), Anand Rai (Verizon / Stevens Institute of Technology), Anatole Norland (Rewriting The Code), Andrew Jacobs (Jacobs Ventures), Bruno Bilik (91.life), Christina Dorando (Cresthill Academy), Clare DeNicola (the10company), Dee Marshall (AI Training Plus), Dennis Yuscavitch (Accrete), Ed Sawma (Ed Sawma Consulting), Eric Schmalzbauer (Prospective), Felicia Palmer (tapyoca), Jennifer D’Angelo (NJII), Jennifer Jolley (PDHI), Jessie Lee (SmartTravel.com), Joe Maruschak, Joe Spivack (Jumpstart NJ Angel Network), Jose Gabriel Carrasco Ramirez (Quarks Advantage), Jossy Harrington (mssuzie.io), Kenneth Jones (Xerdict Group), Marc Saint-Ulysse (Northgate Operations), Marty Coleman, Michael Baer (TechCXO), Miquel de Quadras (Atomian), Natalie Kaminski (JetRockets), Orin Davis (Quality of Life Laboratory), Rahul Mehendale (Live150.ai), Roman Tsibulevskiy (Dentons US), Stella Alvo (Westfield Consulting), Stephen Makinen (Lockheed Martin), Vishal Goyal (Orchestra Prime), Vishal Soni (Virid Biosciences), Wadnes Castelly (KAPAB Marketing Consultancy), and Yuri Fiaschi (Infobip).
Join the Next Cohort
The next Uplift cohort kicks off this September. If you’re an early-stage founder in New Jersey who wants a mentor in your corner, apply here.
Experienced operators, investors, and founders: the program only works because mentors show up. Ed Sawma mentored this summer after years spent deep in technology marketing and pricing. “I wanted to help startups in the New Jersey community grow their businesses. Everybody who has a skill set they could offer should consider it, because it’s really rewarding. It’s great being able to lend a hand and make an impact.” If you’d like to mentor in the next cohort, apply here.
Not sure yet? Read more about how Uplift works or become a TechUnited:NJ member.
Let’s build a better future, together.