Two recent University of Georgia engineering graduates turned a passion for tabletop gaming into a successful senior project and business.
Over the past two years, Jsing Yang and her business partner Alex Luu have perfected Moontrace — a machine that shuffles cards for tabletop card games such as Magic: The Gathering, and Pokémon.
“Players spend thousands of dollars collecting these cards to gain a competitive advantage at tournaments,” Yang told judges at the Summer Launch pitch contest on Aug. 8. “These cars aren’t just collectibles, they’re assets. To protect these assets, players put these cards inside of a sleeve. But these same sleeves are the problem. Players say they’re bulky, less flexible, and almost impossible to shuffle by hand or regular card shufflers.”
Yang, Lu and team brought their prototype to several small tournaments and plan to use their $5,000 in prize money to showcase the shuffler at the nation’s largest card game convention — Collect-a-Con — in Atlanta this September.
Summer Launch is the last stage of UGA Entrepreneurship’s multi-tier approach to fostering and developing student businesses. Since 2016, 865 startups have participated in UGA Entrepreneurship business accelerators, and 50 teams completed the Summer Launch capstone.
As part of Summer Launch, each team receives $5,000 in seed funding and one-on-one guidance to get them to the point where they are bringing in revenue. Collectively, the three teams completing the program brought in $65,000 this summer.
In addition to Moontrace, judges heard from Jack TerHaar, a recent MIS graduate who launched the mobile car detailing service Detail Dawgs in 2022. MIS students Landon Stone and Caleb O’Neil pitched Symbiotic Solutions — a company they founded in 2023 to help small and medium-size businesses and organizations customize and merge their customer relationship software and websites.