Student Founders Are Ready to Make 2025 a Vintage to Remember
- Chuck Isgar
- Mar 31
- 11 min read
Updated: Apr 1
Chuck Isgar (MBA ‘25) speaks with those building across domains ranging from healthcare to home ownership.
For the second time, The Harbus is profiling student founders who are going to build their ventures after graduation. The founders featured this year are working across various domains and come from backgrounds ranging from the military to private equity. However, there is one common denominator — and it isn’t AI. Rather, it is the tenacity of these founders and their commitment to their ventures. Several are in the midst of fundraising or ready to kick off their raises. Most importantly, they are serving hundreds of users — patients in the case of Laptis and Coord Health, and property owners and service providers through Oply’s home infrastructure platform. Their commitment to becoming entrenched in the industries in which they are operating begs a question: might this be a banner entrepreneurial graduating class from HBS?
Laptis: Building the Digital Highway for Substance Use Referrals
“Not having an idea is the first of thousands of obstacles you’ll face.”
This is the attitude Andrew Steen (JD/MBA ‘25), a former army ranger, had as it relates to finding the problem space in which he wanted to work. His journey to building Laptis, a startup focused on the care navigation journey for substance use disorders, started with listing out categories that felt personally impactful and presented an opportunity to solve a business problem that could significantly impact society. After speaking with experts across gun violence, the criminal-legal system, and other major problem areas, he landed on substance use disorder, a field where systems have not changed much in over 20 years despite rapid technology expansion.
The problem is personal to Steen: he has unfortunately had peers from the military and college who have struggled with substance use disorder and has “always [been] puzzled by its intractability.” The company has the goal of becoming the “digital highway for substance use treatment referrals.” At present, the company’s core product is an AI-enabled search navigation dashboard that targets sending-side entities and helps them find treatment centers for patients instantly, rather than months later. In essence, the company serves as a marketplace connecting care navigators with treatment centers.
The focus makes sense. Care navigation is hard and expensive, generating hundreds of billions in excess cost, Steen says. Most of this cost is passed onto health plans, so health plans, governments, and hospitals all have real incentive to improve care access, create healthier patients, and, in turn, lower their costs. To date, Laptis has connected nearly 200 patients to care, is working with four hospitals, and, importantly, now has data from hundreds of treatment centers on its dashboard. Given Steen’s goal for Laptis to disrupt the entire substance use disorder epidemic, this emphasis on data collection has the opportunity to compound over time and become a key unlock for the company.
True to his character and background, Steen is proud of the scrappy nature of the company’s launch journey. Focusing on an unscalable solution first as opposed to obsessing over the technology was the “single most important business decision.” He described this process as not being “comfortable but was super important.” This firsthand immersion into the problem allowed him to see the bottlenecks that make this such a big problem: finding real time availability, understanding insurance applicability, and uncovering nuanced clinical quality data.
Steen acknowledges that his military experience has taught him how to “double down on the capacity to suffer and fail” and embrace the “mud [he throws] himself into as a founder.” Steen’s co-founder, Kevin Hu, is a student at Harvard’s Graduate School of Engineering and Design. They met when Steen was Hu’s teaching assistant at a law school class.
Laptis is currently in the midst of closing an oversubscribed pre-seed round.
Oply: Making Home Ownership Intelligent and Proactive
For most people, a home is the most valuable asset they will ever own, yet there is “no standard system for tracking maintenance, improvements, or projected risks” for a property. A car, on the other hand, usually has in excess of 50 dashboard indicators to identify warnings and prevent further issues. This discrepancy led Lindsey Chrimson (MBA ‘25) and her husband, Gabe Chrimson, to focus on the challenges of home maintenance and launch their startup, Oply.
At its core, Oply is an AI-powered home infrastructure platform that predicts, automates, and optimizes home maintenance, “transforming every property into a self-managing asset.” The company achieves these goals through a variety of mechanisms: their AI generates an “Oply Home Score,” which is a dynamic figure that estimates a home’s future health and the projected cost of maintenance. The score can allow a homeowner to see the financial impact of their projected, realized, and foregone maintenance decisions. In order to arrive at the score, Oply ingests thousands of parameters, such as maintenance history, appliance details, and even climate risks in a given area.
When it comes time to make maintenance decisions, Oply offers a services marketplace that makes it easier for home owners to choose whom to work with, allowing the homeowner to avoid the sea of targeted ads that comes with a Google search. Simultaneously, it serves as a demand generation channel for home service providers ranging from HVAC to plumbers to general contractors. While the marketplace of services is important, there is an even bigger problem Oply is trying to solve: ensuring that homeowners learn what needs to be done in their home and when. The company also provides the opportunity to put all of a home’s valuable records in one secure, digital location. In this way, Oply increases a home’s value by not just prompting important, continual maintenance, but also by helping the homeowner have the data to back up their story around the condition and investment into the house.
Oply launched its product in Nashville in August of 2024. They now serve in excess of 2000 homeowners and 550 service providers. A key metric for the company is the service rebooking rate, and Oply has seen greater than 40% of users rebooking services within 30 days, according to Chrimson. Customer acquisition cost is also a major part of the business’ economics. To this end, it has been focusing on partnerships with real estate brokerages, franchise home service brands, property management companies, builders, and homeowners associations. These partnerships are a win-win, as these organizations benefit from longer term relationships with clients, while Oply gets access to scalable distribution channels with abundant amounts of homeowners.
Oply monetizes through several avenues: homeowners pay a $9.99 per month subscription fee for maintenance tracking and concierge booking. Realtors can subscribe for $16 per month to offer Oply to past clients. The company also monetizes its services marketplace by charging a transaction fee for each job booked through the platform. Service professionals pay for jobs they accept via the platform, but they are not charged for leads, unlike marketplaces like Thumback and Angi, where they pay by lead.
The husband-and-wife co-founder duo “saw firsthand how homeowners struggle to understand their home’s needs” after Chrimson scaled a successful property restoration business before selling it in the summer of 2024. The pair met at West Point, where, post-graduation, Lindsey became the first female in U.S. Army history to pilot the AH-6 Little Bird in Special Operations.
The company will begin a fundraising round in the coming weeks. It plans to raise $3 million to focus on scaling efficiently and further improving its AI-centric technology. It also intends to increase the vendor network to additional cities while going nationwide with its core software product.
SECONDSENSE: Equipping Consumers and Brands with Resale Market Intelligence
Chris Lucas (MBA ‘25) has a goal for “secondhand to become the first choice.” We buy homes and cars second hand all the time, contributing to trillion dollar industries informed by market intelligence providers like Redfin, CarGurus, and Carvana. Yet, when it comes to clothes, shoes, and accessories, the data around resale is lacking. Lucas has made it his mission to uncover the “data lake of secondhand transaction information,” which has benefits for both the consumer and enterprise.
On the consumer side, there’s a hair-on-fire problem that may be leading to slowed growth at many major resale platforms, such as the RealReal and Rebag: an identical item is “listed across different marketplaces for wildly different prices.” Similar to how the Chrome browser extension, Honey, sought to reduce shopping cart abandonment, SECONDSENSE seeks to provide a layer of data transparency that assures consumers they are getting the best price on a given item across all resale platforms. The ultimate goal in providing this information is to reduce the time spent purchasing, which can sometimes take weeks given the manual nature of comparison shopping.
An open question is how major resellers will want to interact with SECONDSENSE when they reach scale. Lucas’ optimistic view is that these resellers will want to have their products listed on SECONDSENSE in order to increase the eyeballs that see their offerings. The less encouraging view is that these resellers will worry about cannibalization and the potential of lost business to competitive resellers, in which case Lucas will turn to a model that embraces partnerships with resellers that are operating at a smaller scale, such as regional boutiques abroad that can get access to a new customer segment by having their products listed on SECONDSENSE.
As for monetization, a traditional affiliate model will be employed where SECONDSENSE gets a commission for each sale it generates. However, consumer sales are, in Lucas’ view, “a trojan horse for business-to-business sales.” If done right, SECONDSENSE offers the promise of accumulating pricing and demand data across all resellers, which can be sold to the brands directly. For the major brands, especially luxury ones, “brand equity [is] prioritized above all else,” according to Lucas. However, once a firsthand sale occurs, the brand has zero visibility into how its products are performing, at what prices, in what conditions, and to whom they are being resold. Thus, the opportunity to better understand the consumer could be a huge unlock for teams at retail brands ranging from pricing to product design. Further, many younger consumers are “using secondhand as a gateway into a brand.” That secondhand consumer can later become a firsthand consumer, so it behooves the major brands to want to know more about that buyer.
With respect to contextualizing the market opportunity of the company, Lucas describes the market capitalization opportunity as “Zillow plus Bloomberg Terminal,” as opposed to just the RealReal or a similar reseller. According to Lucas, this is an “inherently deeply technical problem.” He will lean into his experiences as an artificial intelligence graduate from Stanford and a former machine learning engineer at Instagram to lead the company’s technical approach. He comes from a family of entrepreneurs, which serves as inspiration for navigating the business side of the company. Lucas has been “head’s down building” and will likely begin fundraising conversations this month.
Orphic: Streamlining the Manufacturing Request-for-Quote Process to Increase Supply Chain Resilience
Chris Jackson (MBA ‘25) and his co-founder, Edwin Zishiri, have identified a critical bottleneck in modern manufacturing workflows: the request-for-quote (RFQ) process. Within automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEM) and their suppliers, engineering teams typically use specialized computer-aided design (CAD) and simulation tools independently, creating isolated data silos. When these teams send designs to external Tier One and Tier Two suppliers for quotes, the lack of standardized data and fragmented nature of internal tools significantly compounds communication complexity. This results in lengthy email exchanges, frequent clarifications, manual adjustments, and prolonged lead times. Meanwhile, the engineering leads are most likely getting pressure from the C-suite to expedite product launches, a goal made more difficult by this slow, manual process.
Orphic aims to redefine how product data flows through the supply chain by first tackling the most urgent pain point: RFQ management. Their cloud-based platform integrates existing CAD and cost-modeling tools to automatically standardize geometry and costing parameters, allowing Tier One and Tier Two suppliers to share quotes in real time. As a result, the manual back-and-forth is cut out, and there is a reduction in rework. Although many large companies have tried to patch this process with in-house or partial solutions, the quoting step has remained a slow, email-driven bottleneck, in part because legacy software providers rarely prioritize cross-organizational collaboration.
While Orphic’s broader vision is to evolve into a comprehensive product development intelligence platform, its current focus is streamlining the RFQ process. The ultimate target customer for Orphic is major automotive brands. The company’s beachhead markets are Tier One and Tier Two suppliers that are creating separate components, such as seats and overhead lights, since most OEMs are set up to solve problems at the subsystem level. Jackson is “focused on solving problems at the system level, where interactions across disciplines actually happen.”
The team is planning to begin a fundraising round within the next few weeks. They are targeting $2 million with the goal of creating two years of runway and bringing on two to three engineers with CAD and software engineering experience. The team is looking for investors who are open to historically archaic industries that are now undergoing a technological revolution. By streamlining the quoting bottleneck first, Orphic “aims to become the connective tissue in modern manufacturing workflows, enabling faster, smarter product development at scale.”
Coord Health: Supporting Patients and Providers in Women’s Health
Estimates project a shortage of over 5,000 full-time OB/GYNs in the U.S. by 2030. While OB/GYNs are often seeing 30 to 40 patients per day, OB/GYN appointments last only 15 minutes on average. At the same time, women’s health outcomes in the U.S. lag other high-income countries. These are some of the data points that inspired Christina Vosbikian (MBA ‘25) to launch Coord Health, a tech enabled service to connect patients with health support teams between their OB/GYN appointments in an effort to bridge persisting women’s health capacity gaps.
A policy major at Princeton, Vosbikian has “always [been] interested in women’s advocacy and equity.” Her career started with investment banking at Goldman Sachs and later private equity at Berkshire Partners, an upper middle-market firm in Boston. While there, Vosbikian was on the consumer team and had the opportunity to work on healthcare-focused deals that further developed her interest in healthcare innovation with an equity lens.
Vosbikian came to HBS with the goal of spending time with providers, patients, and payers. In her first year, she worked part time at Series B-backed Allara Health and Planned Parenthood Direct and spent the summer doing the Rock Summer Fellows program, which allowed her to shadow providers closely. Coord is a reflection of Vosbikian’s career experiences and observations: OB/GYNs are overworked, and patients are also often frustrated within this strained system. The status quo, according to Vosbikian, is providers working overtime to gather patient resources for at-home care and lifestyle. OB/GYNs work hard to do this in their “free time,” but it is an incomplete process and, as a result, patients often find themselves going to social media for the out-of-appointment support they need.
Coord equips OB/GYNs and patients with virtual support teams — nurses, health coaches, and dietitians — so that women can get convenient, high-quality virtual care and lifestyle coaching at-home. Women can book video visits with Coord’s team of healthcare professionals and also get asynchronous, text-based support. In recent years, insurance coverage has expanded for the kinds of preventative care that Coord is aiming to deliver.
Vosbikian’s intention is for Coord to partner with providers to provide wrap-around support for their patients in a way that does not add to OB/GYNs’ already intense workloads. With digital health infrastructure having evolved notably in recent years, Coord’s digitally-native nature also holds the promise of providing a better line of sight for providers into what their patients are doing between appointments.
A tailwind for Coord is the push towards telehealth and remote patient communication that has occurred over recent years, especially after the onset of COVID-19. Clinicians are now used to meeting with patients online, which bodes well for Coord, given how the platform connects patients to experts via a virtual medium. To date, Coord has served over 100 women directly and is early in serving OB/GYN practices. Vosbikian plans to raise capital as Coord scales to help support in-clinic traction.
Chuck Isgar (MBA ’25) loves all things startups. He serves as a Scout for Costanoa Ventures and most recently, he was the Chief of Staff at Scenery, a Series A-stage startup backed by investors such as Greylock. Previously, he was a Schwarzman Scholar where he earned a Master in Global Affairs from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. Chuck co-founded and was the CEO of Intern From Home, a recruiting technology startup that served students from over 600 colleges and was featured in publications such as The New York Times. Chuck earned his bachelor’s from Brown University, where he served as the Co-President of the Brown Entrepreneurship Program. He loves to golf, cook, and go on long walks.
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