Creating an Award-Winning Startup

Undergraduates Nigel Oommen and Johnathan Wheeler were simply classmates when they enrolled in the College of Engineering and Computing Sciences’ Necessary Eleven Steps to Tech Startup (NESTS) course. Now, they are friends, co-founders, and award-winning business partners with their startup company Edvana.

When brainstorming ideas to pursue during the fall 2025 NESTS course, Oommen, a biology student, and Wheeler, an electrical and computer engineering technology student, sought to answer the same question: How could they improve collegiate classroom learning? Their answer was Edvana, a web-based service to make learning more effective, engaging, and personalized for both students and instructors.

Wheeler’s years in active web design and creativity as an engineer, combined with Oommen’s passion for and background in teaching, made for the perfect foundation on which to build Edvana. The duo created the service to act as a voice-driven co-pilot. Instructors can send questions to students’ devices and receive live feedback analytics on the answers given. They can then use those metrics to provide targeted feedback during their lectures, standardizing high-quality instruction, improving engagement and consistency, and cutting down on time spent outside the classroom prepping for the day.

“Edvana gives every student a living interface to apply their knowledge, make a mistake, and grow from it in real time,” Oommen explains. “Edvana was built to make active learning feel effortless.”