PlantSwitch innovates with eco-friendly plant-based plastic
After four years of fits, starts and start-overs, the innovative PlantSwitch, cofounded by Maxime Blandin ’17 and Dillon Baxter ’20, may have hit the plant-based plastic jackpot. The dynamic duo are former SMU students and men’s golf teammates who spent their first few years leading PlantSwitch through a trial-and-error development process to find novel alternatives to single-use plastic products. Through painstaking effort, they found a market-competitive method of turning plant waste into bioplastic pellets. Nearly $20 million in financial backing has rolled into the young company’s coffers to help fund a massive facility under construction in Sanford, North Carolina, that will turn the nation’s agricultural byproducts – such as wheat straw and rice husks – into 50 million pounds of plant-based plastic each year. A multi-million-dollar grant from the USDA will provide regional hemp farmers and PlantSwitch a mutually beneficial arrangement that will set the company up for long-term success. For their innovative work, Baxter and Blandin landed in the latest Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list. “The single use plastic industry is very, very big – way bigger than we anticipated, to be honest with you,” says Blandin. “The key is to come out with as many plant-based plastic products as we can over the next six months to a year and turning every single plastic out there into our technology and making it compostable and widely available.”
Nurovant is a note-taking app business startup
Trevor Gicheru ’25 is an SMU computer science major who has turned a challenging academic situation into a business startup that is winning awards, raising funds and attracting new users. While taking biology at SMU, Gicheru found himself struggling to keep up with lectures. He tried recording them but found that it took too much time to rewatch and absorb what the professor was teaching. He had an idea: What if you could use AI to condense lecture material into digestible bits to save time and make studying easier? His idea came to life in Nurovant AI, an innovative learning app that turns recorded lectures – up to 90 minutes in length – into digestible summaries, flashcards and quizzes. Hundreds of SMU students are already integrating Nurovant AI into their university experience and singing the app’s praises. Gicheru believes his app could also improve learning outcomes for students with dysgraphia, a neurological condition that inhibits a person’s ability to write down what they are thinking.
“I want to take this startup as far as I can,” Gicheru says. “I’d like to see it acquired by a big company that can put it into as many schools as possible to help as many students as it can. I’d like to have both a student-facing version and a school-facing version. I’ve been talking to investors and some engineers to help with coding, and I’m looking forward to seeing where this can go in the future.”
Attendance tracking system helps SMU students stay focused
College life provides a level of freedom that causes some students to lose track of their classes and attendance and ultimately fall through the cracks. Jude Lugo ’25, an SMU management major, recognized the problem when he tried to keep track of his own absences and determine which ones were and were not excused. He came up with the idea for LectureLogger – a comprehensive attendance tracking system that gives SMU students and faculty a common portal to see who’s missing class and who’s falling behind. Lugo first presented his idea at SMU’s Big iDeas pitch contest and later won over $74,000 in prize money as the first-place winner at the SMU Startup Launch Competition. Administrators are now finding ways to incorporate LectureLogger into the classroom experience and already noticing improvements in student engagement. The app provides an excusal feature that facilitates student-professor communication and uses a dynamic QR code system that streamlines attendance reporting. About 84% of students have reported that they are more likely to attend classes when using LectureLogger.
“It started out, for me, just seeing my professor struggle with attendance,” says Lugo, who also serves as student representative to the SMU Board of Trustees. “I saw it was taking up a lot of their time, and it was hard for me to keep up with attendance because of all my extracurriculars. It was a problem to solve for both parties.” Today, Lugo sees LectureLogger as an “opportunity to really help students succeed in a larger sense.”
