From Pharmacy Student to Funded Founder: How Sakhi Patel Built CuraVoice Through BizWorld’s YES! Program
When Sakhi started building CuraVoice at the end of 2024, she wasn’t thinking about paid contracts, joining BizWorld’s YES! Program, or pitching her new MedTech startup at conferences. She was a third-year pharmacy student who had noticed a gap – healthcare schools teach students what to say to patients, but rarely how to say it. That observation became a platform. CuraVoice lets healthcare students practice real patient conversations with a custom AI voice agent, receive graded feedback and build the communication confidence that clinical training often skips. Today, the platform has over 550 users across more than 100 universities worldwide, and a paid workforce training contract with an independent pharmacy. Getting to this point though, required more than a good idea. Finding the Right Room Sakhi heard about BizWorld’s Young Entrepreneur Success (YES!) Program through a LinkedIn post from a previous cohort winner. At 21, she was still learning the language of startups – terms like customer acquisition cost, and lifetime value were new territory – and most accelerators she encountered weren’t built with students in mind. “A lot of big accelerators are not always built with a student in mind,” she explained how BizWorld’s YES! Program is differnt. “Just being in a space where you also see other young people like yourself is really motivating.” What drew her in wasn’t just the curriculum, it was the environment, one where not knowing something wasn’t a liability, and where every participant was just like her, figuring things out in real time. Treated Like a Founder, Not a Student Founder One of the things Sakhi kept coming back to was how BizWorld reframes the idea of a student entrepreneur. There’s an unspoken assumption in many programs that a student led project has an expiration date; that it ends when school does. BizWorld pushes back on that idea. Her mentor made it clear early on: don’t let the momentum stall on your ideas just because you’re still in class. The focus wasn’t on surviving the semester, it was on building something that would still be running in five or ten years. “That’s what differentiates this program,” Sakhi said. “It forces you to think long term.” A Safe Space to Get It Wrong One thing the startup world doesn’t always advertise is how much trial and error actually goes into building something. For young founders especially, that process can feel high-stakes – particularly in rooms full of people with decades more experience. BizWorld is deliberately different. The YES! Program is built around the idea that getting things wrong is part of the process, not a disqualifier. Sakhi described it plainly, “What better place to fail than in a very supportive environment surrounded by other young entrepreneurs that are all just trying?” That culture of a business accelerator program matters more than you realize. It means founders show up willing to test ideas, ask basic questions and change direction without it feeling like a setback. Sakhi herself didn’t expect CuraVoice to pivot into workforce training, that direction emerged through conversations, feedback and the willingness to keep questioning early assumptions. But BizWorld’s support doesn’t stop at encouragement. What makes the program genuinely distinctive is what happens after the final Demo Day pitch event where participants have the chance to take home $30,000 in funding. Winners aren’t handed a cheque and sent on their way, they’re brought back for structured six and twelve-month check-ins to report on how their funding is actually being used. It’s accountability built into the model, and it sends a clear message: this isn’t a school prize, it’s an investment in a real business! “BizWorld wants you to tell them, ‘Hey, in six months I said I would do this, and now I did it,’” Sakhi said. “That’s where treating us like real founders actually comes in.” Demo Day: A Different Kind of Pitch Competition The YES! Program’s pitch even Demo Day, isn’t structured like a typical pitch contest. There’s no fixed first, second or third place winners. Founders make their own funding ask, explain exactly what they’ll use the money for and the judges decide from there. This year, five companies walked away with funding between $2,000 to $10,000. But would you believe it that at first, Sakhi almost didn’t make it to Demo Day at all. Due to the quality of her pitch at the end of the YES Program’s 10-week accelerator, she wasn’t selected in the initial round to proceed to the finals at Demo Day, but a wildcard community vote – which she won – put her back in the room. She went on to deliver a new pitch, answer the judges’ questions with confidence and expertise, and walked away as the top-funded company, taking home $10,000. “I was not counting on being the absolute winner,” she said. “Seeing people really rally for me was good enough in and of itself.” So what will this new found investment be sued for? The funds are going toward cloud infrastructure to support CuraVoice’s growing data needs, conference attendance to reach pharmacy owners and hiring managers, and a targeted marketing push. BizWorld also builds in six and twelve-month check-ins to hold winners accountable – another signal that this is real investment, not a prize cheque. What’s Next for CuraVoice CuraVoice is expanding beyond the student market into workforce training, giving employers a credentialing layer to assess how well candidates can actually communicate with patients, not just what they know on paper. It’s a pivot that came directly from conversations at a pharmacy conference, where owners and hiring managers asked for exactly that tool. For Sakhi, the BizWorld experience didn’t end at Demo Day. The connections, mentorship and community have continued, which she says is exactly what young entrepreneurs need most. “There are spaces where you will feel supported,” she said. “but if you don’t try, you’ll never find them.” Support the Next Generation of Founders Many people are often surprised by the fact that the YES! Business Accelerator program is free
