Student Entrepreneurs Leverage I-Corps to Turn Software Project into Successful Exit

QuikCal, a startup founded by undergraduate engineering students at Duke University, was recently acquired by MOCA Systems, Inc., a leading provider of construction planning software, for its artificial intelligence-driven tool designed to improve communication between office and field personnel on commercial construction sites.

Although the QuikCal team was formed at Duke, it has strong ties to the Wolfpack community. The team was able to leverage North Carolina State University’s National Science Foundation (NSF) I-Corps Program to gather valuable, real-world market insights that enabled them to better understand their customer and successfully refine their product offering into a viable software tool.

Breaking Ground on a New Solution

QuikCal initially formed while participating in an undergraduate engineering course at Duke University that pairs teams of students with industry partners to solve real-world design problems. Ken Kalin and Delali Cudjoe – both first-year students in the Duke Pratt School of Engineering at the time – were matched with Skanska USA, a major construction company experiencing challenges efficiently scheduling deliveries at construction job sites.

Despite having little knowledge of the construction industry, the team developed a prototype app that used web forms, reminder texts, and calendar integrations to avoid delivery mix-ups. Their solution offered an easy way for on-site construction personnel to share important job information – typically manually written on physical whiteboards in the field – with office staff charged with delivery scheduling.

Both Kalin and Cudjoe had no entrepreneurial aspirations at the time – “I saw this as a vehicle to improve my coding abilities”, noted Cudjoe – but the positive feedback they received from the client encouraged them to carry the project into another semester to continue development. After another semester of work, the team had developed a working prototype of the app but were unsure of the next steps to bring their solution forward. 

A grant from Duke’s Christensen Family Center for Innovation in January 2024 helped the team continue development of the tool. Dr. Adria Dunbar, managing director of the center – and a former NC State faculty member and software entrepreneur – encouraged the team to deepen their understanding of the construction industry by talking to real-world customers to better design and position their solution. Dunbar recommended they apply to NC State’s NSF I-Corps Program, a five-week short course designed to teach academic researchers how to assess and validate product-market-fit for new, technology-based solutions.

“Years ago, I was research faculty at NC State working on two software projects,” Dunbar recalled, “Our team tapped into I-Corps as a way to structure customer discovery and hold us accountable, which helped us keep moving forward when other commitments started competing for our time and attention. In my current role, I could immediately see how useful I-Corps would be to our student founders like Ken and the QuikCal team.”

Real-World Insights

QuikCal joined the March 2024 I-Corps cohort at NC State as the only undergraduate team in a group of primarily NC State faculty and graduate researchers. “We were all doing the same work but we were coming at it from a different perspective,” observed Kalin. “We knew less about our market because we had not been working on our project as long, but we also had fewer assumptions.”

Through more than 30 customer discovery interviews within the construction sector, the team quickly realized they had been targeting the wrong segment. Initially focused on IT managers within general contractor companies, the team realized the project managers and supervisors on-site were those truly experiencing challenges coordinating resources and timing, and would be the decision makers most likely to adopt a new solution to the problem.

Challenges in soliciting responses from cold-calling prospective contacts also prompted the team to venture to local job sites to secure interviews. One such visit enabled Kalin to view the use of a physical construction whiteboard, which validated their concept and  prompted a hands-on discussion of the communication challenges this format presented. This outcome would not have been possible, Kalin noted, if he had not visited the site to conduct an in-person interview, and this relationship he developed with the company ultimately led to them becoming the team’s first customer.

The I-Corps process also helped the team to build a clearer map of the construction ecosystem and develop relationships with champions within the industry outside of their direct customer base who provided valuable feedback, advice, and connections for the team. The course also changed their understanding of fundamentals such as the value proposition. Because they were engineering students, their initial instinct was to focus on a technology solution. “I hadn’t taken any business classes,“ Cudjoe added, “so growing my business vocabulary and focusing on our value proposition was helpful in defining our team goal and what problem we were trying to solve.” 

A Company Takes Form

With insights from I-Corps and business coursework the team completed at Duke that spring that helped the team to strengthen their business acumen, the team redefined their value proposition and began to consider how artificial intelligence advances could be utilized to increase the capabilities of their tool. By summer 2024, Kalin and Cudjoe – joined by teammate Alec Liu a year earlier – leveraged the support of the Duke Law Clinic to formally incorporate QuikCal LLC. 

That summer, QuikCal completed two pilot projects at Triangle-based construction sites, including Raleigh’s $117 million Wake County Public Health building, which informed further development of the initial QuikCal offering. These pilots allowed the team to rapidly test features and iterate based on on-site user feedback. 

One key insight emerged from the pilot projects and their I-Corps interviews: while digital planning tools were widely used in the construction industry, a pressing pain point remained around the disconnect between digital tools used in offices and analog systems like whiteboards used in the field. Construction companies often don’t have an efficient way to digitize data recorded on physical whiteboards located on-site, requiring time-consuming manual entry of this data into the software system.

To address this, the team began developing QuikPlan, an AI-enabled tool that bridges the gap between manual planning boards and digital planning software. The team was able to repeat the I-Corps process and complete additional customer interviews to inform design of the new offering. 

Raj Narayan, associate director of the Kenan Institute for Engineering, Technology & Science at NC State and the team’s I-Corps instructor, noted the evolution of their thinking. “Adaptability is a key leadership trait of successful entrepreneurs,” he said. “The team demonstrated their adaptability as they considered the needs for their customers and the problem that they were solving, which enabled them to better understand the alignment between problem and need, and develop a solution that addressed the actual problems their customers were facing.”

Exit Strategy

As they entered their senior year in fall 2024, the team faced a pivotal decision: whether to pursue QuikCal full-time after graduation. With job offers in hand and limited experience in raising the capital required to build out a full product, the founders began to explore other pathways to transition their tool into the market. Because they had constructed a specific feature that could solve communications challenges between digital and analog solutions, the team began to contact providers of existing construction software platforms to pitch their tool as a powerful integration. 

In April 2025, MOCA Systems, Inc‬‭. (MSI) – Boston-based developer of construction planning platform Touchplan‬‭® – announced its acquisition of the QuikCal application and associated code. The company cited the value of the QuikCal tool in hastening the industry’s transition from analog to digital planning for construction projects, and all three founders are working with the MSI team to support integration of their tool into the Touchplan platform for launch later this year.

Following graduation this month, the three QuikCal co-founders will transition into roles in the tech-industry with a unique entrepreneurial experience. Kalin, who accepted a role at a Boston startup, reflected on the benefits of the journey in helping him to understand real-world entrepreneurship. “It’s easy to be an armchair entrepreneur, to sit in your room and code on a laptop,” he said, “but there is a big difference between working on a project and working on a business. I-Corps challenged us to go out into the world and uncover real, actionable information.” 

Cudjoe, who will join Amazon as a software developer, referenced the benefits of domain knowledge. “I was totally unfamiliar with construction prior to this effort, and it’s helped me to see the importance of understanding the industry when building a solution. I’m excited now to get to learn about new problem spaces in different fields.”

Liu, who has accepted a software role with Microsoft, added, “We built something from the ground up, but I want to see how the professionals do it now – so I know how to make the most of the next startup opportunity.”