After living the student-founder struggle themselves, they turned a successful Demo Day experiment into a nationwide accelerator built by students, for students
When Roman Scott and Itbaan Nafi began hosting student Demo Days at Stanford in 2024, they weren’t trying to build an accelerator. They were creating space for student founders to show what they were building – and it worked.
The events helped student founders gain visibility, refine their ideas, and, in some cases, build enough early traction to extend beyond the pitch.
As the Demo Days continued, Scott and Nafi noticed something important. The students who performed best weren’t necessarily the most polished. They were the ones who were able to find even the smallest amount of continued support after the event.
What it’s like to still build in school
What would happen if student founders had access not just to a moment of attention, but to sustained resources?
Both Scott and Nafi were living inside this reality themselves. Scott, with experience in software engineering at Meta and investment analysis at BlackRock, understood how quickly startups are expected to professionalize. Nafi, a product designer with experience at Apple and Omnicure Health, saw how difficult it was for students to experiment without resources.
So, rather than ending the effort there, the two chose to expand it.
The Demo Days they hosted began attracting attention beyond Stanford, and that attention became the turning point. Scott and Nafi realized students across the country didn’t just need a platform – they needed belief, runway, and a community that understood what it means to build while still in school.
“We’ve nailed the student-founder experience to a T,” Nafi said in an interview with Tech Crunch. “Hence why we offer the resources we do and have structured the program in this way. Students really feel like we get them, and that’s because we are students.”
A new starting line for the next generation
Earlier this week, the duo launched Breakthrough Ventures, a $2 million startup accelerator built specifically for college students and recent graduates.
Breakthrough is designed as a hybrid accelerator, combining in-person meet ups – often hosted by major venture capital firms – with a national cohort that culminates in a Demo Day at Stanford. The structure allows students from across the country to participate without dropping out or relocating.
To help run the program, Scott and Nafi recruited Raihan Ahmed, a Stanford sophomore focused on human-centered AI, to lead day-to-day operations. Together, they raised $2 million from institutional partners including Mayfield and Collide Capital, alongside a handful of fellow Stanford alumni founders.
The fund offers student startups a package of opportunities, such as non-dilutive grants of up to $10,000, compute credits through Microsoft and the Nvidia Inception program, ongoing mentorship and the chance to secure up to $50,000 investment.
The goal doesn’t seem to be to rush students into fundraising, but to give them time – time to build, test, and learn without giving up their company too early.
The plan is to deploy the fund over three years and support roughly 100 companies, with a focus on fields like AI, health tech, and sustainability, where early experimentation is expensive but impact can be transformative.
At the end of the day, Breakthrough Ventures isn’t just another story about producing unicorns. It’s a story about preserving possibility. Scott and Nafi built the accelerator because they realised too many students quietly let go of their dreams – not from lack of talent, but from lack of support.
When students help students, entrepreneurship becomes less about who already has access, and more about who’s willing to try.
