Venture Founder is Innovation UBC's flagship entrepreneurship program, a 16-week deep dive that turns bold ideas and research discoveries into real startup companies. Open to UBC faculty, staff, and students, the program offers experiential workshops on everything from customer discovery to go-to-market strategy with hands-on mentorship from a network of 250+ founders, investors, and industry leaders. Since its launch over a decade ago, Venture Founder has helped dozens of cohorts, spanning AI, biotech, climate tech, and beyond, move from early-stage ideas to validated, investable ventures.
In this story, read about Formme, a company that graduated from our Venture Founder program this past summer. Formme's team consists of Mira Sehgal, Dibyendu Roy, Prajna Nayak, Mallika Handa, and Rythem Shah, coming from UBC's Faculty of Arts, Applied Science, and Science respectively. Hear from the team on what they're building, their biggest pivot in the journey of building Formme, and the importance of consistency.
Tell us about yourselves. What is your background, your UBC connection, and what drew you to entrepreneurship?
We're all incoming fifth-year UBC students, coming from science, arts, and applied science. Entrepreneurship never felt like a plan for us. It felt like the only logical response to what we kept hearing. We talked to over 85 designers before we ever wrote a line of code, and the same story kept coming up. A manufacturer would go quiet for week, or a quote would change with no explanation, or a designer would have no idea where their own product was even being made. After the 20th conversation like that, it stopped feeling like bad luck and started feeling like a broken system nobody had bothered to fix. That's what pulled us in. Not a business plan, but the sense that we'd stumbled onto a real problem we couldn't unsee. UBC gave us the tools to actually go build something about it, but the drive came from those 85 conversations.
What is your venture, and why does it matter?
We've built Formme, a fashion-tech platform that takes brands and designers from sketch to production with far less friction.
At its core, Formme is an all-in-one platform covering the entire production journey. Brands can create standardized production briefs and get quotes, communicate with manufacturers, and manage everything through to final delivery, all in one place. We work with a network of vetted manufacturing partners, and we've built software that lets those manufacturers track production at every step. That data powers regular, automatic updates to brands, so they always know exactly where their designs stand in the production process.
This matters because manufacturing has historically been a black box. Brands often have little visibility into where their products are being made or under what conditions, and that lack of transparency creates real risk, both operationally and ethically. We're determined to change that.
Formme is built as a two-way street. Manufacturers get software that helps them streamline their own operations, while designers and brands get the visibility they've never had, real insight into their orders, their timelines, and the environments their products are made in.
Ultimately, we want to lower the barrier to entrepreneurship in fashion. Starting a brand shouldn't require mastering supply chain logistics from day one. By handling the operational complexity, Formme lets designers focus on what they do best, designing, while giving them the confidence and visibility to grow.
Since entering Venture Founder, what has been your biggest pivot or challenge in building your venture? How did you get through it?
Our biggest pivot came from realizing we were solving half the problem. We started out building a platform focused entirely on brands, something that would keep them updated on their production. But the more we talked to manufacturers, the more we realized they were struggling just as much, if not more. Most of them had no real system for tracking their own orders. They were juggling everything across spreadsheets, texts, and memory. That's actually where the communication breakdown with brands was coming from in the first place. You can't update someone on something you can't track yourself.
So we shifted. Instead of just building a tool for brand communication, we built the software manufacturers needed to track their production day to day. Once that existed, the brand-facing problem basically solved itself. We could just pull from that same data to keep brands in the loop, without building a separate system on top. We only caught this because Venture Founder pushed us to keep doing customer discovery interviews long after we thought we already knew the answer. Our mentors in the program were also a huge part of making that pivot feel manageable instead of like starting over.
What's next for your venture? What are you working toward in the next 12 months?
We're not starting from zero. We already have revenue coming in, which has given us real signal on what's working and what still needs to be built out. Over the next 12 months, our focus is on refining the tech so it can handle more volume and more complexity without breaking. That means tightening up the production tracking software on the manufacturer side and making the brand experience even smoother as we scale.
At the same time, we're not slowing down on the conversations that got us here. We're going to keep talking to brands and manufacturers, keep bringing on new customers, and use what we learn to sharpen the product even further. Longer term, we want Formme to be more than just software. We want to build an actual community of creatives, a place where designers and manufacturers alike feel like they're part of something bigger than a transaction. That's the version of this we're working toward.
Our Venture Founder program is for UBC student ventures, UBC student companies, and UBC spin-offs with an idea worth building. Applications for our Spring 2027 cohort are open, so don’t miss your chance to develop your strategies, gain mentorship, and commercialize your startup idea! Learn more here.
