How’s this for a business lesson on bootstrapping? Two acquaintances from middle school reconnect in college — during a freshman orientation on Zoom, to be exact. A few weeks into their first semester they pull out a mothballed idea they believe might provide “a little magic” to help companies easily integrate their software. Over the next three years, these two computer science majors with little business background survive the “let’s quit” crossroad multiple times. They win a few competitions to generate financing. Together, they put in 3,000 hours and a grand total of $1,000 of their own money to develop this artificial intelligence (AI)-driven system they call ToolCharm. Their magical moment happens late one night when their technology finally works the way they once imagined: seamlessly and within milliseconds.
“A magic potion that no one else has,” they say, “and we created it!”
Four months later these UCF students and Burnett Honors Scholars, Mark Bruckert and Owen Burns, agree to sell ToolCharm to a leading fintech company, OneEthos, for a large confidential sum. To the best of anyone’s recollection, they’re the first student team to initiate a startup in UCF’s Blackstone Launchpad and sell it prior to graduating.
“We took a gamble on ourselves,” Bruckert says, “and it’s safe to say we made a good return on our investment.”
Burns and Bruckert will earn their diplomas this spring and summer, respectively, yet they’re already looking back on their entrepreneurial steps with gratitude. None of this would have happened if Bruckert hadn’t stored away dozens of big ideas, or if Burns had enrolled at another university, or if the two of them hadn’t found each other early their freshman year at UCF, or if there were no Blackstone Launchpad conveniently located in UCF’s Student Union.
Bruckert and Burns certainly wouldn’t be the subject of a success story if they’d succumbed to repeated temptations to give up.
“Everything we’ve accomplished traces back from UCF to our upbringing,” Burns says. “We were both instilled with a mindset to focus on wins whenever we’re down and to refuse to fail.”
The culmination of this story is OneEthos purchasing ToolCharm and hiring Bruckert and Burns to work as research and development engineers. But there’s more to the triumph than a straightforward agreement. The two say their own values align with OneEthos, which plans to use ToolCharm to make fintech more accessible for smaller banking institutions and millions of people.
“We feel like we’ll be helping institutions like Bailey Building and Loans in It’s A Wonderful Life, Burns says. “It fits everything we stand for.”
Bruckert and Burns grew up just north of Orlando and first met in a web development class at Milwee Middle School. Transforming ideas into usable technology stirred up the kind of curiosity their parents had always encouraged. Bruckert began to save some of those ideas into a digital file in case they might be useful someday.
During high school, the two of them followed their own paths, but their core beliefs gradually pulled those paths back together. When it came time to choose a college, Burns didn’t want to build up a pile of debt out of state. He’d taken a few Coursera-style machine learning courses online and became inspired to pursue AI because of material written by former UCF faculty member. He also heard UCF would offer the space and collaboration for curious tech-minded undergraduates like himself.
Bruckert had similar reasons for choosing UCF. Growing up, he’d attended football games at what is now FBC Mortgage Stadium and began to hear about student-led tech clubs on campus.
“Everything about UCF felt right — clubs, tech research, freedom to explore ideas and starting a career with no debt,” Bruckert says.
Burns says when Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering Ying Ma offered him a lab opportunity do research on reinforcement learning, “the brakes came off. Up until then, AI was just a hobby.”
About a month into his own freshman year, Bruckert decided to participate in the Knight Hacks hackathon, where students are challenged to build a tech project in 36 hours. Burns joined him. Bruckert had come up with an idea over the summer while working at a bank, where he experienced firsthand how time-consuming it was to switch between online tools like Salesforce and Outlook.
“The idea was to create a way for people to use multiple programs without changing tabs or using separate log-ons,” Burns says. “We didn’t have anything close to workable after the hackathon, but we came away thinking, ‘With a lot more work, this might be useful. Maybe we should keep working on it.’”
A day later they walked into the Blackstone Launchpad where they met with experienced entrepreneurs to learn about business basics. When they weren’t being mentored or studying for classes, they worked tirelessly on developing ToolCharm.
“Mark and Owen practically lived downstairs in our upstart space,” says Cameron Ford, executive director of the Blackstone Launchpad, “and Mike Pape was a great mentor for them. “
Over the course of the next few semesters, they earned enough grant funding and money from pitch competitions, including $7,000 from placing second in UCF’s 2022 Joust New Venture Competition. to keep moving forward. They also incorporated ToolCharm before it was a finished product.
“There were innumerable times when we thought maybe we should stop,” Burns says. “Something would come out and make whatever we were working on obsolete.”
It was during those moments when they realized two entrepreneurs were stronger than one.
“One of us would ask the other, ‘Do we get back up?’” Bruckert says. “The answer was always, ‘Absolutely. We need to pivot or start from scratch if necessary.’”
Starting from scratch required a months-long reset. It meant a completely new approach to solve the same problem. Bruckert and Burns had to train and optimize their own transformer models. They worked through many nights, often in the UCF Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership’s Upstarts Incubator. The complexities could have overwhelmed them. Instead, they kept encouraging each other to keep moving forward, methodically. Then, while making late-night adjustments during a remote call in July 2024, they ran through a series of tests and it happened: ToolCharm suddenly spun up in a fraction of a second.
“I can’t describe how exciting that moment was,” Bruckert says. “After three years of effort, of believing in our own hypothesis, we had it — useful technology.”
When the leaders at OneEthos heard about ToolCharm, they wanted to learn more about it as a product. After Bruckert and Burns pitched it with skills gleaned from the Blackstone Launchpad, OneEthos offered to acquire it. Instead of two guys trying to run the entire business, including customer service, the tech can now reach an infinite number of people.
“OneEthos took us seriously,” Burns says. “When we said we were UCF students, they said, ‘Great. You developed an incredible product.’ We worked years to hear that kind of response.”
When Bruckert and Burns graduate in 2025, they’ll take with them incalculable research experience, entrepreneurship knowledge and a stronger belief in the value of their work ethic.
“[And],” Bruckert says, “we won’t have any debt.”
