A shining star in Charlotte’s constellation of startup ventures offers STEM resources to a growing number of young women — and internship opportunities to entrepreneurial students.
Abi Olukeye is the tech-savvy founder of Smart Girls HQ, which has its headquarters in UNC Charlotte’s PORTAL Building. Last year, she received Charlotte Inno’s Blazer Award, and Mom 2.0, an online gathering of professional influencers, named her among its finalists for Entrepreneur of the Year.
Smart Girls HQ’s website RaisingSmartGirls.com and its captivating hands-on STEM learning kits, Dear Smart Girls, are central offerings for the operation. The first kit, designed to teach electrical engineering concepts as “smart girls” build a light-up headband, made it into nearly 3,000 homes in 2021. In fact, it sold out during the holidays.
“No matter how quickly we replenished our supplies, we continued to sell out,” said Olukeye. “We do a minimal amount of marketing, not because we don’t want to get the word out, but our small team is stretched creating and building resources for young women, educators and caregivers to use in traditional and nontraditional educational settings. We are looking forward to increasing our capacity this year.”
Traffic to the website RaisingSmartGirls.com is up exponentially, and Olukeye and her team broadened their reach into three school districts. Despite all this growth, her team still prioritizes outreach and community service locally.
“We continue to deepen our outreach at Dorothy J. Vaughn Academy of Technology (DJV) in Charlotte because It’s important to me that we have an impact in the community in which we live and work,” Olukeye said. “The amazing staff at DJV literally call me Mrs. Claus because we bring them the best stuff — all for free. I am incredibly grateful to the partners that helped make it happen over the years, such as Corning Inc., Method, Mign, Coaching Right Now, Discovery Place and Charlotte Chapter of The Links Organization.”
In addition to doubling its space in PORTAL, Smart Girls HQ continues to offer talented Charlotte students internship opportunities. Three rotating, paid internships are available to assist with production, social media and photography/video.
Here’s what’s on the horizon for Smart Girls HQ:
- A beta version of the AI-driven feature for its learning app to help parents choose the right age-appropriate steps for their smart girls. The goal is to populate the app with 1,000 recontextualized resources for the algorithms to utilize. UNC Charlotte professor Mary Lou Maher, a faculty member in the College of Computing and Informatics and an expert in artificial intelligence (AI), has been partnering on this application, along with two computer science Ph.D. students.
- Hiring a product manager with recent funding from the NC Idea Foundation and Black Entrepreneurship Council to complete the commercialization of the new Dear Smart Girls engineering kits launching this year, and content writers to assist with STEM-related resources for educators and parents, which will be offered in Spanish language versions.
- Bolstering free offerings to caregivers and educators through a $150,000 bridge grant from VELA Education Fund, the highest award it bestows. Last year, Smart Girls HQ worked with Orange County’s summer scholars program, providing nearly 200 educators with a detailed STEM-related curriculum, including activities, study guides and Q&As.
- Pursuing a second round of funding — totaling $1 million — from the National Science Foundation. In early 2021, Olukeye won a $250,000 U.S. Small Business Administration Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant.
In fall 2018, Olukeye began her commercial enterprise through Ventureprise, UNC Charlotte’s center for innovation and entrepreneurship. She later participated in Venturprise’s Regional National Science Foundation (NFS) Innovation-Corps (I-Corps) programming. This six-week curriculum is designed to take early-stage entrepreneurs through the customer discovery process. Recently, Olukeye and two Ventureprise alumni were recognized by Gov. Roy Cooper and the North Carolina African American Heritage Commission as STEM leaders as part of the 2022 observance of Black History Month.
The Inside UNC Charlotte article “Collaborating to close the STEM gender gap through innovation and fun” chronicles Olukeye’s experiences with Ventureprise, her partnership with Professor Maher and how UNC Charlotte, and being located on the campus, has been integral to her startup success.