You can track a pepperoni pizza from the oven to your front door in real time. But in the global education system, a student can fall through the cracks for months before a single red flag is raised.
OCU Meinders School of Business grad student Tonderai Shekede, the founder of an education-focused machine learning platform called (Student Adaptive Support Habit Architecture), may have found a novel technological solution. He took his ideas, formed a team, and entered the competition. The team of data analytics student Shekede, MBA student John Williams III and finance major Ugochinyere Cosmas Maduba was among the top 6 finalists in this year鈥檚 contest.
Shekede鈥檚 inspiration came from personal experience. While studying in Dubai, he learned that his sister, Sasha, was struggling with her schoolwork back home in South Africa. She wasn't a problem student, she was simply a student caught in a system that relied on delayed data and disconnected adults.
"The system did not fail her out of malice," Shekede said. "It failed her due to a lack of architecture."
Now, he and his team are building that architecture. Their goal is to turn SASHA into the foundational operating system for student accountability.
From codebase to competition
The journey to the Entrepreneur鈥檚 Cup, Oklahoma鈥檚 premier collegiate business plan competition, began with what Shekede calls "divine intervention": An ad on a digital monitor in the Meinders School of Business.
What started as a solo project quickly evolved into a startup built from the ground up. To survive the 鈥淪hark Tank鈥� atmosphere of the Cup, the SASHA creator knew he couldn't do it alone. He recruited two fellow students he鈥檇 observed in class, Williams and Maduba, to join his quest.
鈥淚 watched other students in my classes, how they did presentations and how they carried themselves,鈥� Shekede said. 鈥淚 had interactions with these two and decided these guys would be perfect for the project.鈥�
The team was guided by their coach, Kyle Golding, the business school鈥檚 director of corporate relations and special projects. Golding has an entrepreneurial background with over 35 years of business ownership experience and was formerly chairman of the Oklahoma Venture Forum.
鈥淎 lot of universities talk about incubating startups, but OCU actually gave us the runway to build enterprise infrastructure,鈥� Shekede said. 鈥淪pecifically, the leadership and mentorship from Kyle have been the defining factor. He prepared us for that room by insisting our financial models and regulatory frameworks were as bulletproof as our code. When you have a mentor who treats your platform with the gravity of a real enterprise, it elevates everything you build.鈥�
The tech
SASHA is a "sovereign educational operating system" designed to solve the two biggest hurdles in EdTech: hallucination and liability.
"The ML (machine learning) is mathematically firewalled," Shekede points out in his executive summary. "It cannot guess. It is tethered directly to state rubrics, IEP goals and district compliance laws."
The platform鈥檚 nuts and bolts include predictive analytics that flag at-risk students before they fail; behavioral telemetry, creating what Shekede calls a "Burnout Heat Map" for district superintendents to visualize student stress levels in real-time; and zero-latency interaction using LPUs (language processing units) to ensure students can talk to the platform as naturally as a human tutor.
The cup
The Entrepreneur鈥檚 Cup served as the ultimate pressure cooker. 鈥淒esigned to simulate the real-world process of launching a startup, the competition challenges students to research a market, write a comprehensive business plan, and pitch their venture to potential investors,鈥� as its website states. For a technical founder used to the comfort of a lecture hall, the competition was a wake-up call.
"I鈥檝e always been confident," Shekede said, "but I鈥檝e never been put in a real-life pressure situation. Standing in front of those judges forced myself and the team to take 500-plus iterations of complex machine-learning architecture and distill it into a pure, undeniable business case. That environment is exactly what prepares a technical founder to actually go to market.鈥�
The competition includes several rounds and workshops, with business plans submitted in early March. The five finalists were invited to pitch their companies to a board of investors on April 7.
The team spent four days before the finals refining their pitch, realizing that while the code was brilliant, the product had to sell itself. They knew they would need to translate complex machine learning into a narrative that the judges could grasp.
Whether or not they won, Shekede is intent on making SASHA a global enterprise. It is currently in active testing phase, running live pilots and awaiting approval for major app stores. For now, the team is targeting 野狼社区鈥檚 K鈥�12 and higher education markets. Shekede sees it as a solution to a core human need.
"Everyone goes to school," he said. "We have all this data and technology now. Let's solve knowledge.鈥�
Interim Dean Robert Greve, who coached several teams to success in past pitching contests, said participating in the Entrepreneur鈥檚 Cup competition is an excellent way to practice an array of business skills.
鈥淚t's a wonderful event. It gives students an opportunity to, in one project, address multiple business disciplines. You have finance, accounting, economics, technology, management, marketing, all in one business pitch,鈥� Greve said.
