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Who Would Have Thought A Research Project Could Become A Great Startup?
I recently had the chance to speak with Arun Saigal, co-founder and CEO of Thunkable, about what it takes to take an undergraduate research project and turn it into a full-fledged commercial venture. Thunkable is the platform where anyone can build their own mobile apps via a drag-and-drop interface and is available on both iOS and Android. Instead of having to tediously code or used pre-made app templates, a user will drag components of their app and connect them with visual blocks. For those who have no coding experience, Thunkable gives them to tools to build the apps they’ve always wanted. Arun graduated from MIT with a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Computer Science and is a 2018 Forbes 30 Under 30 Honoree in Consumer Technology.
His startup, Thunkable, was incubated at Google and MIT, and now has 500K users and more than 16M monthly active users (MAUs) of apps built on the platform.
Frederick Daso: We know that your startup was originally a research project. When did you realize this Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) project could be so much more?
Arun Saigal: When we were working on MIT App Inventor, the project had 4.3 million users around the world who had built more than 13 million apps. One day we were looking at the user data and saw that a…
