Students Pushing Innovation (SPIN) participant Mankeerat Singh Sidhu and National Center for Supercomputing Applications graduate student researcher Hetarth Chopra won first place in the 2025 Cozad New Venture Challenge for Tandemn, an innovative software solution designed to help democratize artificial intelligence computing resources.
Tandemn links idle graphics processing units (GPUs) into unified, high-performance networks designed for AI computing. The goal is to lower costs and barriers to GPU access while providing owners with possible users for their underutilized resources.
“While everyone talks about ‘democratizing AI,’ the reality is that GPU access remains a huge barrier,” Sidhu said. “Tandemn aims to change that.”
That vision led Tandemn to a first-place investment of $60,000 in the Cozad New Venture Challenge and the Dr. Paul Magelli Innovation Award, a $10,000 prize.
“Cozad gave us invaluable validation, funding and a platform to dream big,” Sidhu said.
Sidhu and Chopra’s research experience with SPIN and NCSA played an inspirational role in the Tandemn project.
“While at the NCSA SPIN program, I spent two wonderful semesters building a large retrieval augmented generation pipeline that automatically compiled literature‑review drafts for researchers,” Sidhu said. “The biggest roadblock wasn’t the model or the data, it was simply finding affordable GPUs to run the system – a pain shared by SPIN interns and, frankly, by teams and companies everywhere. That frustration added up to become the spark for Tandemn, the distributed‑GPU network I’m building today.
“I’m grateful to the SPIN mentors and colleagues whose support (and candid complaints about compute costs) helped turn a project into a solution the whole world can use, and the countless meetings prepared me for investor and customer talk.”
“I was fortunate to be appointed as a research assistant under Professor Vikram Adve, where I focused on deploying edge‑AI workloads on the latest Intel chips,” Chopra said. “That hands-on experience with hardware constraints and the ingenuity required to overcome them shaped how we architect Tandemn’s distributed GPU network. Plus, the NCSA building is an inspiring place to work. The collaboration and energy there gave me insights that continue to guide our team today.
Tandemn’s success in the Cozad competition led to additional funding opportunities. So far, Sidhu and Chopra have secured $1.5 million from private investors to further develop the project.
“We’re eager to pilot Tandemn,” Sidhu said. “With the funding already committed from investors, we have the runway to execute for the next year and a half and turn this vision into reality.”
Read more about the Cozad New Venture Challenge winners in the release from the Technology Entrepreneur Center at the Grainger College of Engineering.
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