Scaling Olympus

“The building is an incredible funhouse of ideas,” said Meredith Meyer Grelli (TPR 2010), who became the program’s director in August 2024. “It’s this wild, cavernous space with stairs going everywhere. Every pocket you walk into is a different company. They’re all distinct. Some have a few people, and one has had up to 11 in one of the largest spaces.”

Project Olympus assigns space according to the size of the company. As they mature, they rise up the building’s staircase — mimicking Mt. Olympus of Greek mythology — until they reach the point where they need to move out to expand.

Project Olympus team from left to right: Senior Program Manager Melanie Simko, Program Director Meredith Meyer Grelli and Program Administrator Matthew Katsaros

The year before he defended his thesis, Arora realized his research had broad-ranging commercial applications with the potential to impact people’s lives.

“To me, the direct way to do that was through entrepreneurship,” he said, but he had never held a job before, so he had no frame of reference. As he began looking for resources at CMU, he found Project Olympus.

For Arora, the most important resource the program offered was helping him understand how to get started. Grelli’s predecessor, Kit Needham — who directed the program from 2008 until retiring in 2024 — spent hours teaching Arora how to think about his business, what resources were available, and what thought process was required, especially in discovering who his potential customers might be. She introduced him to attorneys and investors, and Project Olympus provided him his first office space.

Today, Gather AI has 50 employees internationally, plus a wide range of paying customers. Its first three investors learned about the company through Project Olympus.

Running a company “is much harder than I thought it would be, just because of the diversity of the different problems that need to be solved,” Arora said. “That’s the fun of it — I’m really having fun.”

He also draws a great deal of satisfaction from knowing how his technology is making people’s lives easier. In some warehouses, for example, the drones have allowed people with visual impairments to hold jobs that require counting, and workers who formerly had chronic neck pain from trying to take inventory manually can now turn to other tasks.

“I believe that’s all a maker really wants — that someone uses what they’re making,” Arora said. “And I get to experience that every day.”

Taking the Plunge

Grelli said the quest for personal satisfaction is typical of the founders with whom she works.

“People who decide to do the seemingly irrational thing and cut the cord from their comfortable existence, whatever that might be, have a common characteristic,” she said.

“They just have this notion, this idea, this thing they have to build and they can’t shake it. That’s when you do the wild thing and jump off the cliff.”

It’s a mindset she understands well. Grelli first dabbled in entrepreneurship while pursuing an MBA at the Tepper School of Business. She created Burgh Bees, a nonprofit that set up community apiaries throughout the city so people could learn how to keep bees. Her vision was to transform vacant land into hives similar to community gardens. On one memorable rainy Saturday, she convinced some of her classmates to help her remove trash from a vacant lot to install native plants and fence posts for an apiary.

By the time she graduated, she had a board, a team, funding and customers, and she was spending more time on the company than on her coursework.

“I just fell in love with this way of life,” Grelli said.

After graduating, she worked at H.J. Heinz North America in brand management, which she equates to running a small company within a corporation. Even so, she yearned for the creative challenges and satisfaction of entrepreneurship.

“I felt like my job was living someone else’s life, and I knew I had to make the leap,” Grelli said.

In 2010, she co-founded Wigle Whiskey and later, Threadbare Cider & Mead. Grelli was instrumental in changing the regulatory framework that allowed her company to become Pennsylvania’s first direct-to-consumer distillery in 100 years and enabled hundreds of other craft distilleries to follow suit.

After stints teaching at Chatham University and Tepper, she assumed her current role at Project Olympus when Needham retired.

Grelli is proud to be continuing the Project Olympus tradition that began with founder and former SCS faculty member Lenore Blum, whom she describes as a “legend.”

“She had this really inclusive vision for entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon,” Grelli explained, adding that it was Blum’s idea to support anyone affiliated with the university, a hallmark of Project Olympus’ mission.

“But she also saw this really interesting opportunity to support the commercialization of research happening at the university,” Grelli added.

Bringing Ideas to Life

The program, part of the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship, of which Grelli is the interim director, helps founders tap into the wide variety of resources available in Carnegie Mellon’s entrepreneurship ecosystem, including the Center for Technology Transfer and Enterprise Creation (CTTEC), the Corporate Startup Lab, CyLab, the Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation, and VentureBridge — which provides $25,000 in funding as part of a 12-week accelerator. It also offers advice on everything from customer discovery to intellectual property and legal structures.

“However a founder finds their way into the ecosystem — which may vary depending on who they are — our goal is to have a shared group of resources that continues to expand for them as they move through that ecosystem,” Grelli says.

In addition to university resources, Grelli and her staff also help people connect with outside resources, including the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps, a seven-week experiential training program that aims to prepare scientists and engineers to extend their work beyond the laboratory. (Read the story.)

Among its graduates is Mitchell Fogelson, founder of Beyond Reach Labs, which he began while pursuing his Ph.D. under the mentorship of Robotics Institute Associate Professor Zachary Manchester.

Fogelson designed kilometer-scale space structures that can fold to fit into a rocket for deployment into space. Through I-Corps, he also learned about additional applications for his technology, including deployable communication infrastructure for natural disasters or massive sporting or cultural events — think the U.S. Open, or a Taylor Swift concert — that overwhelm existing communications systems.

Most of his research is funded through NASA, and recently he won about $200,000 in grants and funding from various competitions and programs. He was also an Innovation and Commercialization Fellow through Carnegie Mellon. To date, Fogelson has built several prototypes and believes he is close to securing his first customer and commercial partnership. After defending his thesis, he plans to work for his fledgling company full time.

Like Arora, Fogelson did not initially envision entrepreneurship as a career path, although many of his family members are entrepreneurs.

“My mom always told me to find people who inspired me and find out how they got to the paths where they are,” he said. He found many such mentors through Project Olympus.

And like Grelli, Fogelson worked in industry for a few years, but he found himself wanting more. He was frustrated when his employer abruptly canceled projects he’d worked on for months, leaving him without the satisfaction of seeing his work’s impact.

“It didn’t show me how I could make the world a better place, and I never got to take the project to its conclusion,” he said.

Fogelson returned to academia to earn a Ph.D., and he vividly remembers his first call with Kit Needham and Melanie Simko, program manager for the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship. They introduced him to the entrepreneurs in residence at Project Olympus, who helped him understand how to translate technology into products and business initiatives, which continued through his participation in I-Corps.

He credits the Innovation and Commercialization Fellowship with helping him put his newfound knowledge into context. He incorporated his business and entered competitions that helped to propel him forward.

“None of that would even be remotely possible without the support of Melanie, Kit, Meredith and the many amazing mentors and staff at Project Olympus and the Swartz Center,” he said.

Cultivating Success

Recently, Project Olympus established an advisory board and investors council to help the program think about how to deepen and scale its relationships with investors. Grelli also invited Mar Hershenson, managing founding partner of Pear VC in Menlo Park, California, to join her in teaching a new course in the fall of 2025 that is cross-listed between the School of Computer Science and the Tepper School of Business, but open to anyone on campus.

Pear VC hosted Project Olympus’ Lab to Market event, bringing about 200 deep-tech founders and investors together in Silicon Valley for a series of panels, intimate dinners and office hours.

Dominik Bauer (SCS 2025) and Cornelia Bauer, a current Ph.D. student in RI, founders of FuturHand Robotics — a company that aims to build dexterous, soft robot hands — were among those invited to attend.

Network building and mentoring have been crucial to the Bauers, who also went through the I-Corps program.

“We’re researchers, so there are a lot of things we don’t know about or don’t think about when developing a business," Dominik said. “It’s a different mindset.”

Jay Reddy (ENG 2021, 2021), who, like Mitchell Fogelson, was an Innovation Commercialization Fellow, agrees.