4/20/2026 Debra Levey Larson
Written by Debra Levey Larson
Aerospace engineering students Gokul Puthumanaillam and Manav Vora pitched their software idea at this year’s Cozad New Venture Challenge and came out on top. As third place winners in the challenge, they received $25,000 in venture capital support. But they also received two additional awards, each for $50,000 from Chicago-based Multimodal Ventures and Pear VC, a venture firm from Menlo Park, California. The funds are structured as company investments to provide support in exchange for a future share of the company.
The software they proposed will allow robots to be more energy efficient, which will lower costs.
“Battery data exists, but real-time energy decisions don’t,” said Puthumanaillam. “As a result, expensive robots spend too much time not working, and scaling uptime today often means buying more robots. UncertIA solves this with software that optimizes energy use in real time to extend mission time, improve uptime, and lower operating costs.”
Vora added, “It’s a middleware layer that helps robot operators reduce energy waste and downtime by optimizing real-time planning decisions, enabling longer missions, higher uptime, and lower operating costs.”
Puthumanaillam and Vora are Melkior Ornik’s Ph.D. students in The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Ornik said UncertIA is based on his research group’s recent efforts to create ‘just enough sensing.’
“The concept is to allow robots to perform in complex environments where they need to use their sensors, but battery power is severely limited and the robot must carefully choose which sensors to turn on, and when,” Ornik said.
Puthumanaillam and Vora said UncertIA targets mid-sized robotics firms and large enterprises deploying robot fleets. These companies may have the budget to improve the amount of time a robot is operational and functioning correctly without interruption, or uptime. But they often lack the internal robotics software capacity to develop energy and optimization tools.
“I provided my help and advising the overall effort, I very much took the backseat,” Ornik said. “Gokul and Manav are the true leaders here. Now, comes the logistically hard part of forming a company.”
Puthumanaillam is joining NVIDIA Seattle Robotics Lab as an intern this summer and Vora will be joining Nokia Bell Labs as a research intern.
The Cozad New Venture Challenge is an annual contest through Grainger’s Technology Entrepreneur Center to empower the next generation of entrepreneurs.