Five Students from The University of Texas at Dallas have become 2022 Texas Business Hall of Fame Scholar awardees for undertaking entrepreneurial journeys. A common passion for improving people’s lives has netted each of them $15,000 for their innovative and entrepreneurial excellence.

In 2019, Jason Hendricks, an MS in Innovation and Entrepreneurship student at the Naveen Jindal School of Management and U.S. Army veteran, founded Forgot or Knot, a service that hand-delivers gifts and captures the moment to help loved ones stay connected when they are separated. The company recently announced a new partnership with Make-A-Wish North Texas.

While Hendricks, a sales developer with Tellabs Inc., was in community college, a veteran’s program introduced him to entrepreneurship. He came to UT Dallas in 2020, where he seized opportunities to advance his gift-delivery business by participating in the Blackstone LaunchPad Fellowship, the CometX Accelerator program, and the 2021 Big Idea Competition.

“It’s all of these resources that UTD is really investing in me that are collectively elevating me, moving me forward,” Hendricks said.

Leon Jacobson, a recent graduate of the Jindal School’s MBA program with a specialization in marketing and innovation, is developing Painwise, a health technology startup based on a mobile app to enable people with chronic and nerve pain to collect data to learn more about the root cause of their pain and improve their treatment.

Jacobson earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from American University in 2011 and spent the next decade launching three different startups with the goal of making a difference in people’s lives.

Xavier Madison, a Jindal School MBA candidate, co-founded BidCrane Technologies, a software platform that helps minority-, women- and veteran-owned construction entities grow by helping them find and bid on more construction projects and establish key partnerships with material suppliers.

Madison received a bachelor’s degree in construction engineering from Texas Tech in 2016 and is a construction/real estate procurement specialist at Texas Instruments.

“For any startup, there’s tons of great ideas,” he said. “Somebody has probably thought of your idea before, but I think what separates the businesses that actually can develop that idea and launch at scale is a product market fit.” He noted that his Innovation and Entrepreneurship class with Professor Jackie Kimzey, associate professor of practice, Organizations, Strategy and International Management, reinforced this concept, which was vital for his team.

Vivekram Venkataswamy, a recent Jindal School Executive MBA graduate, founded V-Pay Wallet, a Fintech startup based on a central payment gateway to facilitate the efficient transfer of funds between consumers who use different apps, such as Apple Pay, GPay, PayPal, Venmo and Zelle.

Venkataswamy received his undergraduate degree in information technology from Bharathidasan University, India, in 2004. He leads the Information Security Analytics department at Citibank.

“At the Jindal School I had the opportunity to do a fellowship at a venture capital firm, and that gave me the insight into what VC firms look for when investing in startups,” he said.

“No matter where people are around the world, they’re able to send text messages using WhatsApp,” Venkataswamy said. “Same way, no matter where they live, what currency they use, they should be able to send money to whom they want across the world.”

Venkataswamy is working with a technical team in India and vendors in the U.S. and expects to have a product within six to twelve months.

Pouya Modareszadeh, a biology senior in the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, co-founded HemePro Therapeutics, LLC, a UT Dallas spinout developing an anti-cancer therapy that combats drug-resistant tumors by targeting tumor bioenergetics.

In 2019 Modareszadeh joined a lab at UT Dallas led by Dr. Li Zhang. Together they developed this novel cancer therapeutic, and 20 months later Zhang approached him about founding a startup to advance it. They recently achieved patent approval.

“I think the greatest innovations that happen are when two different fields have kind of an intersection,” Modareszadeh said. For the “really deadly diseases — unless there is innovation and people take that risk and push a drug forward and back to development, there’s going to remain a very low survival rate. So that’s what inspires me — to be able to have an impact on people’s lives.”

The five UT Dallas awards were funded by the Mitchell Family Foundation. Lee Roy Mitchell, the founder of Cinemark Theatres, was inducted into the Texas Business Hall of Fame in 2011.