Harvey Mudd Student Entrepreneurs Win 2026 SageTank Pitch Competition

Student entrepreneurs from Harvey Mudd College took first place in the spring 2026 SageTank pitch competition, an event in which teams from across the five Claremont colleges pitch their startups to a panel of VC partners and investors in front of a live audience.

The SageTank event is hosted each year by the 5C student organization Pomona Ventures. Winners receive funding to invest in their startup, and all competitors receive publicity and networking opportunities to help jumpstart their companies.

First-place winner Whistle was developed and pitched by Kevin Xia ’28, Daniel Zhu ’29 and James Gómez CMC ’27. Whistle is an agentic NCAA compliance software designed to help athletic departments stay compliant with NCAA regulations, an often complicated and time-intensive process. The software allows anyone within an NCAA athletic department to ask a compliance question and receive precision answers, citing exact bylaws, within 30 seconds.

“NCAA compliance is a huge issue, with teams having dedicated staff answering these questions from everyone within the athletic department in order to stay compliant,” said Xia. “The impact of Whistle is twofold: It helps the compliance officer find answers to the questions they get faster, and with extreme precision so NCAA compliance infractions don’t occur.”

The idea for Whistle grew out of the co-founders’ love of playing competitive soccer. All three play for the Claremont-Mudd-Scripps (CMS) men’s soccer team, and their athletic and entrepreneurial pursuits intertwined.

“A lot of our teammates actually are very entrepreneurial, and that definitely helped,” said Zhu. “That environment allowed us to get really close and decide to work together.”

Their first product iteration, CoachBooks, was built specifically for college athletics coaches and developed directly with CMS soccer coach Edward Cartee.

“We love competition and winning, and entrepreneurship is a domain in which you are directly competing with others,” said Xia. “There is nothing else like it. For example, to get our first customer, we literally bought a cake and walked into their office asking for five minutes of their time and turned a ‘no’ into a ‘yes.’ That feeling of ‘cold-caking’ someone to get your first customer, working late at night with your best friends even when no one is watching, building something of your own and growing it—that feeling is indescribable.”

Xia also credits the academic courses and programs at Harvey Mudd and the other 5Cs for providing valuable knowledge, skills and mentorship. Xia took both semesters of Enterprise and Entrepreneurs with instructors Josh Jones ’98 and Benson Tsai ’06. The team worked closely with Entrepreneurship Studio director and computer science professor Zach Dodds. Xia also went through the Claremont Accelerator program, a 5C student-run accelerator that helps student founders scale their ventures by providing capital, mentorship and staffing.

The Whistle team will use their $5,000 prize to work full-time this summer on growing the company. The team is eager to keep the momentum going and welcomes contact from interested parties.