Prahasith Veluvolu

When the Thiel Foundation announced the 2017 class of Thiel Fellows, it gave his hometown as Indianapolis. His Y Combinator founder profile lists him as an alumnus of Park Tudor High School.⁠[1][2]

Xconomy writes that he and two friends from Park Tudor High School, Jacobi Petrucciani and Colton Voege, ran a web consulting business from their childhood bedrooms and shut it down when they enrolled at Purdue UniversityPurdue UniversityPurdue University is a public research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, United States, and Indiana’s land-grant university. Established and named by the Indiana legislature in 1869, it began classes in 1874. Today the Purdue system comprises main campuses in West Lafayette and Indianapolis, regional campuses and an online university.Open the full entry.⁠[3]

He studied computer science in the College of Science at Purdue University. He recalled: “Every time we turned in one of our programming assignments, it usually took over a month to get it back.” VentureBeat writes that feedback in his other courses was automated and fast, but not in the computer science department. Xconomy quotes him: “It was taking a long time to grade our assignments and get them back to us.”⁠[4][5][6][3]

In 2014 he founded Mimir with Jacobi Petrucciani and Colton Voege. Purdue’s Department of Computer Science writes that the company started in the founders’ dorm rooms in the fall of 2014; “It was chaotic,” he admits, recalling that they would wake up in time to go to class, run sales calls from coffee shops between classes, update each other on a Skype call at night, and then code from their dorm rooms until one or two in the morning. Y Combinator’s company page gives 2014 as Mimir’s founding year, and Colton Voege’s biography on that page states that the three co-founded Mimir from a dorm room.⁠[5][7][8]

The three entered The Boiler, an eight-week mini-accelerator and startup competition run by the Anvil, a student-run business incubator. Xconomy writes that it helped them refine and commercialize their simple automated grading system, which they built while “doing all of this between classes.” Purdue’s Department of Computer Science writes that they won Purdue’s Boiler Mini-Accelerator Competition and were then accepted into Y Combinator in 2015. He said in 2015: “Our company would have never existed if it wasn’t for the Boiler Competition put on by the Anvil.”⁠[3][7][9]

The company is named after Mimir, a figure of Norse mythology known for knowledge and wisdom (VentureBeat calls Mimir the Norse god of knowledge and wisdom); he said that while they were looking for a name for the company, they were watching the television series Vikings one day and it mentioned Mimir.⁠[7][6]

The Indianapolis Business Journal writes that he dropped out of school in 2015 to focus on Mimir.⁠[10]

That year Mimir was in the running for TechPoint’s Mira Awards: Inside INdiana Business described Mimir in January 2017 as a 2015 Mira Award finalist and in July 2017 as a 2015 Mira Education Tech Award nominee.⁠[11][12]

In the summer of 2015 Mimir joined Y Combinator’s Summer 2015 batch (S15). A Purdue University release states that the team interviewed in late spring and spent three months in Silicon Valley starting in June; he said, “We’re excited to be accepted into this program. Only 2 to 3 percent of applicants are accepted,” “For Mimir this is a definite jump start,” and “We see YC as a growth engine.” The release describes Mimir as a web-based automatic grading platform and learning management system for computer science.⁠[8][9]

The Indianapolis Business Journal writes that Y Combinator pumps $120,000 into its portfolio companies; he said the program helped Mimir grow its client base from seven universities to 30. Xconomy writes that he said the experience really helped the company take off.⁠[10][3]

On July 27, 2015, VentureBeat published an article by Ken Yeung on Mimir, calling it “the youngest graduate in this season’s batch” of Y Combinator; the same day the Y Combinator blog published a post by Alexis OhanianAlexis OhanianAlexis Ohanian (born April 24, 1983) is an American entrepreneur, investor, and author, a co-founder of Reddit and the founder of the venture capital firm Seven Seven Six. He graduated from the University of Virginia in 2005, co-founded Initialized Capital, and later expanded his work into women’s sports, climate philanthropy, and investment software.Open the full entry introducing the Summer 2015 company, which moves the computer science classroom online and automates grading and student feedback.⁠[6][13]

VentureBeat writes that professors upload their assignments each semester and Mimir grades them, logs the results into a grade book system such as Blackboard, and flags students who may need tutoring or may be cheating or plagiarizing; professors can set the grading parameters. The company was then focusing on computer science, and students were charged $25 per semester. Twenty schools were using it, nine of them paying; the schools named include Case University, Pensacola University, Miami Dade University, the University of Louisiana and the University of MichiganUniversity of MichiganThe University of Michigan is a university founded in Detroit in 1817 that moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1837; it is governed by a statewide-elected Board of Regents and also has campuses in Dearborn and Flint.Open the full entry. The company aimed for 50 schools by the end of the summer, and he expected 2,000 students to use it that fall. The service was available only in the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry, with Canada on the roadmap; the company was also considering resources for launching new computer science programs and an instructor collaboration network, and was in talks with Udemy and McGraw-Hill about a possible partnership.⁠[6]

After Y Combinator the three returned to West Lafayette, IndianaIndianaIndiana is a state in the Midwestern United States; its capital and largest city is Indianapolis. It was admitted to the Union on December 11, 1816, as the 19th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 6,785,528.Open the full entry. Mimir was housed at the Anvil coworking space, moving from a shared desk to its own office in under two years. Purdue University wrote in 2019 that he said that, after living on the West Coast, he knew there were significant financial advantages to headquartering a business in Indiana.⁠[3][14][15]

Xconomy writes that Mimir raised a small pre-seed round while still in CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry after finishing Y Combinator, and that he said “a number of investors pulled out” after the company decided to return to Indiana. The Indianapolis Business Journal writes that a California lead investor required the company to relocate and then pulled out along with others, and that Silicon Valley investors had asked the company to move to California; Mimir chose to stay in the Midwest and raised its seed round from Midwest investors, including M25 Group, Chicago Ventures, Meridian Street Capital and Zuna Angel Group, with a $20,000 investment from the Elevate Purdue Foundry Fund. The round closed in 2016, and a follow-on seed round was in the works. Xconomy lists the investors as M25 Group, Meridian Street Capital, Chicago Venture Partners and angel investors, and he declined to disclose the total raised. Inside INdiana Business wrote in 2019 that Mimir is a portfolio company of South Bend-based Heartland Ventures, which made its first investment in Mimir.⁠[14][10][16]

He said in 2017: “We’re very proud of the investors that we have here the Midwest,” and “Indiana is just home for us.”⁠[10]

Xconomy writes in an article dated December 23, 2016, that Mimir’s first product, Mimir Classroom, is a cloud-based tool that lets computer science instructors manage courses and quickly grade programming coursework, with an algorithm that detects plagiarism; it had been used at about 20 schools a year earlier and was now used at more than 70 universities, including Johns Hopkins, UCLA and the University of Michigan. Mimir Classroom is charged per student.⁠[3]

The second product, HireOrbit, is a cloud-based hiring platform built partly on Mimir Classroom’s core technology that automates candidate screening and technical interviews, tracks the whole hiring process from screening to signed offer, and has built-in video chat and one-way video interviews; he said: “What differentiates our product is the built-in skills vetting.” Xconomy writes that HireOrbit was to launch publicly in January, with early access available through the company’s website, in three tiers: the first offering minimal applicant tracking for small businesses wanting a cheap replacement for spreadsheets, the second unlocking all features, and the third serving enterprise customers. The seven-person team also planned new classroom features for 2017 and to let Mimir Classroom users become HireOrbit candidates, with companies able to request candidates with certain skills and a double opt-out for students and recruiters.⁠[3][14]

Xconomy writes that Mimir’s long-term goal was to build computer science courses from kindergarten through graduate school, starting with a planned “hybrid MOOC” whose adaptive learning algorithm tailors content to skill level and lets students summon a live mentor when stuck, the feature he called the one he is most proud of; he said: “We’ve discovered that MOOCs don’t work for computer science.” He also said the company planned to stay in Indiana “for the foreseeable future.”⁠[14]

On January 3, 2017, Purdue University announced that he, Jacobi Petrucciani and Colton Voege had been named to the education category of Forbes’ 2017 “30 Under 30” list, honored for “being part of the new breed of AI grading and teacher-to-student feedback.” He said: “The entire team and I are honored to make it onto the 30 Under 30 list. It’s been a dream of ours for a while now,” and “We’ll be working harder than ever and have some exciting new releases planned for 2017.” Inside INdiana Business wrote the same day that the list included 600 young professionals in total.⁠[4][11][7]

Purdue’s Department of Computer Science writes that Mimir Classroom had graded more than 7 million computer projects and hosted more than 250 GB of submitted files and code; instructors could share projects publicly and any instructor could pull public projects into their own course and assign them to students, and the company was exploring ideas for computer science curricula for high school and lower grades. The article notes that Mimir was headquartered at the Anvil, a coworking space created by and for Purdue students. He said his background was all in programming and that before Mimir he had never done a sales call.⁠[7]

Inside INdiana Business writes that he said Mimir offers tools for instructors rather than creating content, with content creation part of its long-term strategy; that Mimir answered support requests in about three minutes on average, which he contrasted with the impersonal, slow support of other companies; and that Mimir asks its clients which features to build rather than guessing. The article notes that the three founders ran the company out of the Anvil coworking space near the West Lafayette campus, and that Mimir had been touted the previous year as one of 13 startups to emerge from the Anvil in its first two years.⁠[11]

On February 22, 2017, Purdue University announced that he had been nominated in the “Rising Star” category of the 18th annual TechPoint Mira Awards, whose winners were to be announced at a black-tie ceremony at the Westin Indianapolis on April 29.⁠[17][12]

The Indianapolis Business Journal writes that on June 8, 2017, Mimir moved from the Anvil in West Lafayette to about 3,200 square feet on the 8th floor of Market Tower in downtown Indianapolis, up from roughly 600 square feet at the Anvil, where the team had numbered three people a year earlier; it planned to expand to 4,500 square feet in the coming weeks and to reach 20 employees by the end of the summer. The article gives the staff at that time as 14 employees and three interns; he said Mimir’s software had graded 15 million submissions across 80 universities in the spring semester, up from 6 million in the fall. Mimir charges per student but does not disclose student numbers or pricing.⁠[10]

On June 16, 2017, the Thiel Foundation named 25 people to the 2017 class of Thiel Fellows; he is 19th on the list, under Software, and the announcement describes his project as follows: he is CEO of Mimir, which builds a classroom automation tool for computer science and programming courses. The announcement states that the Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry was launched in 2011 to encourage fellows to pursue full-time entrepreneurship instead of going to college, and that the two-year fellowship provides $100,000 and mentorship from the Thiel Foundation’s network of technology entrepreneurs, investors and scientists.⁠[1]

The Indianapolis Business Journal wrote on June 22 that he said the fellowship helped Mimir because he was not taking a salary for the next two years, “and we’ll be able to use that money to grow faster.”⁠[10]

On July 20, 2017, Mimir Corp. announced plans to expand its Indiana operations: Inside INdiana Business writes that it planned to add more than 100 jobs by 2021, expand its new downtown office in the coming weeks and begin adding sales and engineering positions by the end of the summer, while the Indiana Economic Development Corporation (IEDC) release gives up to 102 new, high-wage jobs by 2021. Inside INdiana Business writes that the jobs were expected to pay an average wage more than 50 percent above the state average, while the IEDC release gives nearly 50 percent above. The company then had 14 employees, and its software was used at more than 80 universities. Inside INdiana Business writes that the IEDC offered Mimir up to $1.2 million in conditional tax credits and training grants; the IEDC release lists up to $1,000,000 in conditional tax credits and up to $200,000 in training grants and states that the incentives were performance-based, so the company could not claim them until Hoosiers were hired. The IEDC release also states that the City of Indianapolis supported the project through Develop Indy, a business unit of the Indy Chamber, and that Mayor Joe Hogsett called the plan “great news for Indianapolis.”⁠[12][18]

He said: “The Midwest is a perfect place to scale a startup like Mimir,” adding that Indianapolis is among the most affordable cities in the United States and is growing as a tech hub, bringing more funding and larger employee pools. The IEDC release states that Mimir planned to launch, by the end of 2017, a platform that companies could use to evaluate computer science skills during interviews.⁠[12][18]

On November 10, 2017, Mimir announced that it had acquired Omnipointment Inc., a Chicago-based tech company, for undisclosed terms; Omnipointment’s signature platform, Charter, is a group project tool that helps college students schedule times to collaborate and gives instructors data on team performance. Mimir also launched Mimir Interview, a web-based platform for recruiters and hiring managers that gives applicants a controlled environment to demonstrate coding skills instead of using whiteboards and paper, and helps set benchmarks for internal candidates. He said “Mimir Interview will help recruiters and hiring managers assess external candidates” and that the company was excited to continue improving its core product, Mimir Classroom, with the acquisition of Omnipointment. The company said the acquisition would help it reach its goal of hiring more than 100 employees by 2021.⁠[19]

On March 20, 2018, Purdue University announced that Mimir was a finalist in the “Scale-up of the Year” category, $100,000 to $5 million division, of the 2018 TechPoint Mira Awards; the article states that Mimir was founded by him, Jacobi Petrucciani and Colton Voege, all former Purdue students, and helps computer science educators through cloud-based coursework, including an all-in-one development environment for reading, writing and submitting code.⁠[20]

On February 20, 2019, Purdue University published an article on Purdue student startups expanding across the state, in which he said: “The evolving tech community in Indianapolis was a huge incentive for our move.” He also said that state and city legislation had allowed the company to repurpose what would have been operating costs, and that its time in West Lafayette had helped the team create, define and begin what became Mimir Classroom.⁠[15]

On December 17, 2019, HackerRank, a developer skills company, announced that it had acquired Mimir, its first acquisition, for undisclosed terms. TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry writes that Mimir had previously raised $2.5 million in total and had eight employees at the time, including a three-person executive team; Mimir’s built-in IDE supported 40 programming languages, including Python, Java and C, and the platform offered Jupyter notebook support, tools for creating quizzes and assignments, and a plagiarism detection tool, and was used by schools including UCLA, Purdue, Oregon State UniversityOregon State UniversityOregon State University is a public research university in Oregon, with its main campus in Corvallis. On October 27, 1868, its predecessor, Corvallis College, became the state’s land-grant institution, and the university is now one of the few in the United States holding land, sea, space and sun grant designations. NVIDIA founder Jensen Huang and his wife, Lori Huang, both graduated from its electrical engineering program and have given money to support a research center there.Open the full entry and Michigan State and by corporations such as GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry, with about 15,000 to 20,000 students using it for coursework. HackerRank planned to keep supporting Mimir’s classroom product as a standalone product for now and expected an initial release of a combined product by the second quarter of 2020.⁠[21][22]

HackerRank’s release states that customers such as Michigan State University, the Illinois Institute of Technology and Finger Lakes Community College use Mimir to scale their computer science programs; he said “Mimir has made a name for itself by becoming a secret weapon for computer science programs,” and “HackerRank is the leader in developer skills assessment and a natural evolution of our mission.” TechCrunch quotes him as saying: “Working with HackerRank is a natural evolution of our mission.”⁠[22][16][21]

The Indianapolis Business Journal writes that all eight employees of the five-year-old, Indianapolis-based Mimir, including him, were joining HackerRank, that the Mimir operations would become HackerRank’s fourth global office, which HackerRank planned to grow under its own name; he said HackerRank was expected to begin hiring additional workers in Indianapolis soon. He said: “Indianapolis has become a thriving tech center in the Midwest.” Inside INdiana Business writes that Max Brickman, managing director of Heartland Ventures, called the acquisition “a win for the Midwest Tech and VC ecosystem.”⁠[5][16]

Colton Voege’s biography on Y Combinator’s company page states that Mimir was acquired by HackerRank in 2019 and that Voege himself joined HackerRank as an engineering manager.⁠[8]

On January 15, 2020, Purdue University published an article on the acquisition, describing Mimir as a company that began as a Purdue student startup and had expanded its operations in Indianapolis the previous year. He said: “We’re thrilled to have found an acquisition partner that has similar values and mission that we truly believe in,” described the shared philosophy of the two companies as “skills matter more than pedigree,” and said “HackerRank will continue to support the Mimir Classroom product.” He credited Purdue Foundry, the Anvil and other Purdue and Purdue Research Foundation resources for Mimir’s success.⁠[23]

Mimir’s website states that Mimir Classroom would shut down on September 7, 2022.⁠[24]

Ages given in print: Purdue University gave his age as 21 on January 3, 2017, and the Indianapolis Business Journal also gave it as 21 on June 22, 2017.⁠[4][10]

His Y Combinator founder profile lists earlier experience at Valens Health Initiative, In0v8 LLC and Time Compression Strategies, without dates or roles.⁠[2]

He said in 2015: “We don’t mean this platform to be a replacement for teachers,” and “we want you to learn by doing.”⁠[9]

He said: “Computer science is very hands-on, and if you don’t write code, you can’t learn it.”⁠[14]

His advice to entrepreneurs: “Persistence is the key to success: things aren’t necessarily going to work out the first time.”⁠[7]

Mimir: Official website: https://www.mimirhq.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[24]

Y Combinator: Official website: https://www.ycombinator.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[8]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[25]

HackerRank: Official website: https://www.hackerrank.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[26]

X: Public account: https://x.com/prahasith_v (opens in a new window).⁠[2]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prahasithv (opens in a new window).⁠[2]