Three Carnegie Mellon University students hatch an idea for a new business in a dorm room and wind up turning to the University of Pittsburgh for a leg up.
It may sound like an unlikely storyline, but it’s one that the founders of North Point Breeze-based Inpleo LLC are turning to their advantage in launching their company outside the walls of academia. Inpleo’s experience at Pitt’s Innovation Institute also reflects the university’s ongoing reboot of its entrepreneurial mission under chancellor Patrick Gallagher.
Inpleo, which was founded in 2014 and employs five people, is part of a pilot at the Innovation Institute that paired the fledgling company with Wexford-based BlueTree Allied Angels in a community-based boot camp for startups.
The program offers no funding, but rather the opportunity to hone a startup’s business value proposition and expand its customer list during an intensive, six-week program of lectures and corporate executive mentoring.
“The model has been pretty well vetted,” said Philip Brooks, executive in residence at the Innovation Institute, which Pitt created in 2013. “We’re pretty excited about it.”
Twenty-four-year-old Brian Jeon is pretty excited, too. Mr. Jeon, Jaasin Polin, 25, and Naassih Gopee, 22, formed Inpleo while the three were students at Carnegie Mellon. The company uses its technology to connect American engineering and heavy manufacturing companies with customers abroad, with a focus on engineered supplies.
Inpleo’s brokered products include aerospace goods, computers, processors, architectural windows, heavy mining equipment — even paint. And translating foreign languages is not an issue. Product specifications are fully translatable and the machine learning component of the platform learns with each use, allowing the technology to recommend purchases when prices are lowest, for example.
Think of the technology as search engine Google meets dating website Match.com, where buyers and sellers meet online and deal using a reverse auction, Mr. Jeon said. The company’s centralized platform allows simultaneous participation by corporate finance, marketing and legal department representatives, reducing the time needed to do a deal.
“This streamlines everything,” Mr. Jeon said. “We’re trying to match everybody together.”
Inpleo is financed by the principals and is not yet profitable, but its pricing structure is unusual: buyers list the highest amount they are willing to pay for an item, then they are charged a percentage of savings realized over the listed price.
A buyer who lists $100 as a purchase price ceiling for a particular item, for example, but then finds the item for $10 through the platform would pay a percentage of the $90 savings as a transaction fee.
Data, analytics and platform access are all free for users.
Down the road, the company plans to allow vendors to advertise on the site, creating another revenue stream. For now, Mr. Jeon said Inpleo has been going through a “whirlwind of meeting new people and businesses” through the program.
“It’s really been helping us do customer discovery tools,” Mr. Jeon said. “It’s also been a tremendous networking event for us.”
The six-week project at Pitt is based on the teachings of serial entrepreneur and author Steve Blank, who urges business owners to “get out of the building” to learn customer needs and test the central hypothesis of their business.
Many startups could use a hand — an estimated 75 percent of them fail, according to a Harvard University study. In addition to BlueTree, referrals for the pilot’s first class of startups came from Pitt’s Institute for Entrepreneurial Excellence and a mock pitch event for angel investors is scheduled July 29.
The Innovation Institute pilot continues a drive for increased commercialization of faculty and student research, according to serial entrepreneur Dietrich Stephan, who also chairs the Department of Human Genetics at Pitt’s Graduate School of Public Health.
“We’re working hard to reform our internal policies and procedures to encourage commercialization of entrepreneurial activities,” he said. “And that is absolutely being championed out of the chancellor’s office.”
For its part, Inpleo’s machine learning capabilities can make purchase recommendations based on past deals, sales cycle pricing variability and similar industry purchases. The more the platform is used, the more refined the recommendations become, Mr. Jeon said.
“It learns as it goes,” he said. “It’s like a new baby.”
Kris B. Mamula: kmamula@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1699
First Published: July 18, 2016, 4:00 a.m.