You Had to Be There: Kicking Off Fall at Tsai CITY
From a packed Cross Campus filled with student organizations, resources, and new connections to a room full of founders sharing what they built all summer, the first few weeks of fall semester brought Yale’s entrepreneurship and innovation community together in a big way.
There are some events you attend, grab a free snack, and move on from.
And then there are the ones where you look around and think: Okay, something is happening here.
That was the energy at Tsai CITY this September.
We kicked off the semester with two of our signature events, the Yale Entrepreneurship & Innovation Expo and Demo Day. While each represents a different stage of the innovation journey, both brought people together to discover what’s possible.
First stop: Expo
On September 1, Cross Campus became a hub for Yale’s entrepreneurship and innovation community.
The annual Yale Entrepreneurship and Innovation Expo brings university centers and student organizations together to introduce students to the entrepreneurship and innovation resources available across campus.
Walking through the Expo meant bouncing from table to table, meeting student organizations, discovering programs and resources, and realizing just how many ways there are to get involved at Yale.
You didn’t need a startup or even an idea. You really just needed to be curious.
And this year, something new was happening alongside all those conversations—a live artist brought a painting to life in real time.
For the first time, the Expo featured a live artist, with Moshopefoluwa Olagunju (ART ’27) creating an original work as the event unfolded. The piece began with a sketch informed by conversations with Yale founders, then evolved as Olagunju drew inspiration from the people and energy around him.
Students stopped to watch, ask questions, and returned later to see how the piece had changed. It was Olagunju’s first time creating art live in front of an audience, making the experiment as new for the artist as it was for the Expo.
By the end, the painting had become part of the experience itself: a reminder that innovation can look like a startup or new technology, but it can also look like an artist stepping outside his comfort zone and creating something new in real time.
Then came Demo Day
Nine days later, the energy moved inside Tsai CITY.
If the Expo was about discovering what you could do, Demo Day was about seeing what can happen when you actually do it.
The event marked the culmination of the 2026 Summer Fellowship, bringing student founders together to share ventures they had spent the summer building, testing, refining, and sometimes rethinking entirely.
Founders took the stage with ideas spanning AI, health, technology, consumer products, economic development, music, and more. Anatomist Security, ChaCha Butter, Collegebase, Cosnetix, Finsaku, forEVAhealth, KOHORT STUDIOS, QuarterMill, Safari Strives, Solaris, and Tangram were among the ventures pitching.
And on the second floor, even more Summer Fellows and Yale student founders shared their work through venture postering—giving attendees a chance to walk up, ask questions, and meet the people behind the ideas.
One conversation might be about Ethiopian clarified butter. The next may be about women’s health, AI infrastructure, 3D-printed golf equipment, or workforce development in Rwanda.
That range was the point.
There wasn’t one version of what a founder looked like, one problem worth solving, or one path an idea had to follow. There were many.
Two events. One great start to fall.
What made the Expo and Demo Day so memorable was the people.
Students stopped to ask questions. Founders shared what they were building. Organizations met new members. Friends showed up to cheer each other on. And students who may have been encountering Tsai CITY for the first time left knowing there was a place for them here.
The fall semester is officially underway. Let’s see what you build next.