Brendan Foody (B’25) Wins BIG EAST Startup Challenge for His Company Seros

Brendan Foody (B’25) has been named winner of the 2023 BIG EAST Startup Challenge for his award-winning pitch highlighting his startup, Seros, marking the second year in a row that a Georgetown student has placed first at the annual competition.

The BIG EAST Startup Challenge features innovations and products from teams of student entrepreneurs representing 11 BIG EAST Conference institutions. Teams presented their pitches to judges who ranked them on a variety of factors including idea/concept, market need, value proposition, feasibility, and presentation.

Foody founded Seros in November 2021 with the goal of building the next generation of personal computer infrastructure in the cloud. 5G, Fiber, and Star link are bringing fundamental shifts in networking infrastructure that enable the entire PC to become cloud-based. After developing Seros, Foody managed to successfully lower the cost to access a powerful computer by 90%. 

He decided to take part in the BIG EAST challenge after his prior experiences with Georgetown Entrepreneurship’s ongoing programs and events. Foody previously won the top prize ($5,000) of the Georgetown Ventures and Values Competitions in partnership with Ethical Values of Business Class and the Georgetown Institute for the Study of Market & Ethics for his company, Seros. Foody also pitched and won the top undergraduate prize ($10,000) of the 2022 Georgetown Entrepreneurship Challenge for one of his other business ideas, Mercor, a data driven recruiting platform for software engineers in India.

“I have been thinking of Seros for the past three years and working on it for over a year,” said Foody. “Benjamin Zimmerman, the managing director of Georgetown Entrepreneurship, reached out to me and encouraged me to join the competition.”

In 2015, Foody traveled to Myanmar and was amazed by how many people had access to smartphones but did not have access to personal computers. 

“I got excited about the idea of finding ways we can leverage the connectivity to the internet in the same way people have to their smartphones and give them something more powerful; give them a computer which is possible via the cloud.”

Foody aims to use Seros as a way to utilize the connectivity and the infrastructure that people already have and simultaneously build the first consumer-facing virtual machine.

“We need more good companies around. When building a company, people should not think about making a product that is better than the current one, but rather they should try to make a product that is way better than the current one,” said Foody. 

“Brendan exemplifies the best in being a student entrepreneur at Georgetown University: business acuity and a mindset focused on the common good,” said Zimmerman. “Coupling those skills with his tenacious work ethic, he makes one tough competitor. We are honored to have him as a representative of Georgetown and we are proud to again have a first place winner in the competition.”