On Friday, July 25, University of Notre Dame students, mentors, and alumni, along with local community leaders in commerce and business, gathered in Elkhart’s River District and downtown South Bend to mark the close of the IDEA Center’s summer internship program for student entrepreneurship, Race to Revenue (R2R).

Launched in 2019 with eight students, R2R is a startup accelerator designed to provide select Notre Dame students, known as “Racers,” with the tools to succeed as entrepreneurs. The program has grown steadily since then, with the seventh cohort boasting 17 student founders who raised and earned more than $1 million across 11 ventures, with the support of 16 interns.

Standout ventures include Routora, with founder Luke Blazek securing $200,000 in funds, including from the 1842 Fund; Azam Health, which also reached six figures in revenue this summer; and DoorBlockade, a community-partnered venture which is rapidly expanding business operations.

Demo Day, the summer’s closing event, provides students with a final opportunity to pitch their products to South Bend-Elkhart region’s investors, as well as a moment to reflect on the work of the previous ten weeks, and, for some, the work of multiple summers.

“The final product of this summer is a five-minute pitch, but so much goes into that,” said John Henry, director of student startups at Notre Dame’s IDEA Center. “This program is for the most-committed student founders at the University. What we've discovered over the last seven years is that this is the time for them to join a community of like-minded peers, and this has had a major inspirational and motivational impact on our broader community.”

This summer’s culminating event also spotlighted two ventures from student founders at Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU), who joined the R2R cohort on Notre Dame’s campus for the final two weeks of the program. Both ventures addressed communications needs that would currently benefit the country: Bridge, a secure messaging platform with 7,000 users, and Petsos.app, a 24/7 veterinary telehealth platform for pet owners who had to relocate far from care centers, and has hosted 500 consultations to date.

“Despite everything going on at home, we’re here to show that we're still trying to be a part of the world, that we have ideas and we have people whose experience we want to share,” said Maksym Zabrodin, Program Manager of the IdeasLab at UCU’s Ideas Center. “The students presenting here today, they’re still dreamers, and they represent the Ukrainians who still pursue their ideas in the face of hardship.”

While a Demo Day pitch is delivered by the founders, it also reflects the support of the community. In recent years, R2R has added a mentorship aspect and an internship opportunity for students who are not yet founders but seek to grow their entrepreneurial skills in support of others.

For Jackson Ballow, his stint as a coding intern during the summer of 2024 led him to completely change career paths. Where he once envisioned a career in consulting, Ballow has instead joined the team at DeSyncAI, one of this summer’s R2R ventures.

“I learned infinitely more with Race to Revenue than in a typical, one-track internship,” Ballow said, who graduated from Notre Dame in 2024 with a major in computer science. “Working with multiple teams throughout the summer enabled me to learn new skills to work with different people on different projects, from physical products to online platforms.”

Adam Toland, a recent graduate of the ESTEEM program, first participated in R2R during the summer of 2022 as a business development intern.

“I knew nothing about business development when I walked in for my first summer,” Toland said. “R2R gave me the chance to take the initiative and build up the entire team of sales interns, a learning opportunity which is impossible to replicate in a classroom or even a typical internship.”

Now, Toland is the co-founder of DoorBlockade, a venture which has coupled the work of local inventor Nikolas Ackerman with Toland’s business expertise to launch the sale of an innovative tool to quickly reinforce any interior door in emergency situations.

Also key for Toland as he learns the ropes of being a founder is his relationship with Chris Sinclair, a 2006 graduate of the Mendoza College of Business, founder and president of The Anthem Group, and Toland’s mentor since Henry connected the pair in 2022.

“When the opportunity to join DoorBlockade came up in the fall of 2023, Chris was my first call,” Toland said. “Chris has been here, done this all before, and has been nothing but generous with his time since we first met. I probably wouldn’t still be in entrepreneurship without his listening ear and honest feedback.”

Sinclair added, “Entrepreneurship is about knowing people, but it’s also very tactical: it's funding, it's product development, it's marketing, it's all the things that I've been through. If I can help somebody not make the same mistake that I did in the past, especially to support a venture as important as DoorBlockade, I'm definitely going to do that.”

As the structure of the program has expanded in scope, so has the annual Demo Day. Initially billed as a final pitch day, this year’s closing event also highlighted the development of Elkhart’s River District and the success of R2R alumni, especially those who live and work in the area.

“That’s the fruit of nearly a decade of student empowerment, that we now have program alumni who grew their business during Race to Revenue, and not only continued to grow their business beyond our program, but decided to remain in South Bend,” Henry said.

One such success story is that of Matt Harfmann, the founder of Break’n Bad, an enterprise which facilitates the live sale of sports cards and has generated more than $20 million in lifetime revenue.

While Harfmann founded the company in 2021, the support he received as an R2R participant in 2023 has had a lasting impact on Break'n Bad’s operations and growth.

“Our current CTO was actually an intern when I was a Racer,” Harfmann explained. “We got along great, and he joined the team after R2R ended, which was a huge win for us. He’s made connections with manufacturers and distributors and really taken our growth to the next level.”

Another is Kris Priemer, South Bend native and the founder of Momentum Entrepreneurship Hub, a brand new co-working space located in downtown South Bend. While Priemer was too early to benefit from R2R as a 2011 ESTEEM graduate, current Racers are reaping the rewards of Priemer’s sustained commitment to the South Bend area, which culminated in the development and foundation of Momentum.

In addition to hosting the afternoon program of Demo Day, the hub provided office space for student founders, interns, and program staff during the final weeks of the summer, prompting a notable increase in productivity.

“The environment at Momentum added a professional feel to the summer,” said Josh Miller, MBA candidate and R2R program staff. “It really kicked everyone into a higher gear and a higher quality of work.”

Priemer added, “The energy these student entrepreneurs brought was incredible. We didn’t just want to provide space. We wanted to show that South Bend can be a real launchpad for big ideas. Watching them use the space exactly as it was intended: long days, lots of coffee, and meaningful collaborations and connections, was everything we hoped for.”

Indeed, when Momentum opened its doors to local stakeholders and alumni on Demo Day, the student founders of R2R ultimately walked away having made 30 new connections with collaborators from across the country, and some even from around the world.

“The work we do at the IDEA Center goes beyond the pitches and the money raised,” said Henry. “What our students achieve here is regionally rooted with international reach. ”

About the IDEA Center

The IDEA Center, which is part of Notre Dame Research, is the University of Notre Dame’s collaborative innovation hub dedicated to expanding the technological and societal impact of the University’s innovations. We do this by nurturing and facilitating the movement of the best ideas of faculty, staff, and students from discovery to commercial application. The Center provides the necessary space, services, and expertise for idea development, commercialization, business formation, prototyping, entrepreneurial education, and student entrepreneurial efforts. The Center is open to any University researcher and student with an idea they want to commercialize.

Contact

Erin Fennessy / Writing Program Manager

Notre Dame Research / University of Notre Dame

efenness@nd.edu / +1 574-631-8183

research.nd.edu / @UNDResearch / linkedin.com/company/undresearch

About Notre Dame Research

The University of Notre Dame is a private research and teaching university inspired by its Catholic mission. Located in South Bend, Indiana, its researchers are advancing human understanding through research, scholarship, education, and creative endeavor in order to be a repository for knowledge and a powerful means for doing good in the world. For more information, please visit NDR's website or NDR's LinkedIn.

Originally published by Erin Fennessy at ideacenter.nd.edu on September 17, 2025.