Two teams in Horn Entrepreneurship’s Summer Founders pre-accelerator program are exploring how technology can help people make clearer, more intentional decisions. Prediction Wizard is building a points-based platform for social predictions and friendly competitions, while Budge is developing a pre-purchase decision support tool that helps users pause before spending. This is the first article in a series highlighting the teams participating in the 2026 Summer Founders program. You can meet them at this year’s Demo Day on August 13.
For many people, everyday decisions are shaped as much by emotion as logic. A friendly competition can become difficult to track once points, predictions and bragging rights start adding up. An online purchase can feel simple in the moment, only to become a source of regret later.
Although the ventures address different behaviors, both are focused on a similar goal: helping users bring structure to decisions that often happen quickly, socially or emotionally.
Prediction Wizard - Automated Social Betting
Jacob Wyngaard, PhD in Applied Mathematics, class of 2029
Kyle Wyngaard, BS in Economics, class of 2027 (Washington College)
Prediction Wizard began with a familiar problem: informal competitions among friends can be fun, but tracking them can quickly become complicated.
For Jacob Wyngaard, a Ph.D. student in applied mathematics at the University of Delaware, the idea grew out of his own experience living in a crowded house at NC State. Whether the group was playing Mario Kart, Call of Duty, Monopoly or poker, small friendly competitions added energy to the experience.
“We’d only do like $2 bets and nothing too big,” Jacob said. “But just having some money on the line made the game so much more fun. People were trash-talking more, and it felt so much better to win.”
The fun, however, often faded when the group had to track who owed what. Spreadsheets and pen-and-paper systems made the process feel too formal and disrupted the moment. Jacob saw an opportunity to use his mathematics background to create a tool that could organize group predictions without taking away from the social experience.
Prediction Wizard is now being developed as a mobile platform that allows users to create groups, make predictions, track outcomes and maintain a shared points-based ledger. The goal is to bring structure and fairness to informal competitions while keeping the experience focused on fun, accountability and connection.
The venture became a family effort when Jacob’s brother, Kyle Wyngaard, joined the team. Kyle, a B.S. in Economics student at Washington College, saw the same need among friends, fraternity members and campus social circles.
“We grew up making predictions. It was a huge part of what we did,” Kyle said. “Whether it was pickleball, golf, or a pickup basketball game, keeping track of multiple complex bets across a group of friends gets incredibly difficult. When Jacob showed me what he was building, it completely resonated.”
Through Summer Founders, the team is focusing on customer discovery and product development. Jacob and Kyle are especially interested in young adults in social organizations, club sports and campus communities where friendly competition is already part of the culture.
The team has also been careful to distinguish the platform from gambling products. Prediction Wizard is designed around points, not real currency, and the founders have sought guidance to better understand the legal and regulatory landscape around social prediction tools.
“It is easy for regulators to see the word ‘prediction’ and immediately assume gambling,” Jacob said. “Our goal is to offer points, not money. This is about climbing the leaderboard among your friends, focusing entirely on the social aspect rather than financial risk or addiction.”
Summer Founders has helped the team refine its business model, test assumptions and connect with the broader Horn Entrepreneurship community. Jacob first became involved with Horn after connecting with Linda Walck, program manager at Horn Entrepreneurship, who helped him find his way into UD’s entrepreneurship ecosystem.
“I didn’t know anyone in the entrepreneurship community here at UD,” Jacob said. “Linda Walck helped me get plugged into everything. I took Vince DiFelice’s entrepreneurship course, got involved with the Innovation Delaware Fellowship program (InDE) with Troy Wilford, and now we’re in the Summer Founders cohort."
As the team moves through the Summer Founders program, its goals include continuing customer interviews, refining the user experience and preparing the app for a future launch.
Budge
Rahul Chauhan, MS in Business Analytics, class of 2026
While Prediction Wizard focuses on social decision-making, Budge focuses on personal spending decisions.
Founded by Rahul Chauhan, a recent graduate with a M.S. in Business Analytics, Budge is a pre-purchase decision support platform designed to help users pause before making a transaction. The idea came from Rahul’s own frustration with the time and energy required to make everyday purchasing decisions.
Rahul noticed that many young adults do not struggle because they lack information. They often know how much money they have, what they want to buy and what their financial goals are. The harder challenge is behavioral: knowing when to pause, reconsider and decide whether a purchase actually fits their priorities.
“My struggle, majorly, was spending a lot of time making those decisions,” Rahul said. “That’s a lot of time wasted to get a simple yes or no.”
Budge is designed to fill the gap between budgeting tools that track past spending and financial apps that focus on money after it has already been saved or invested. Instead, Rahul is exploring how a tool could intervene earlier, before the purchase happens.
The platform would use psychology to understand how you spend and why you spend, to stop you from spending, recklessly. The goal is to convince people by giving them an understandable reason which they can relate to. Rather than simply rejecting a purchase, Rahul envisions the tool as a conversation that helps users think through whether they truly need or value the item.
“It’s going to be more of like a conversation where you can either convince the app or get convinced versus a yes or no,” Rahul said. “I could change my answer based on your responses. At the same time the app will make you pause before you act on an impulse purchase. The more time you spend making and understanding the decision, the better it will be”
Rahul is currently focused on customer discovery, including problem and solution interviews, to better understand who feels this pain point most strongly and whether they would use a tool to address it. For him, the most important outcome of Summer Founders is not rushing to build a product, but developing a deeper understanding of the behavior behind the problem.
“I know this problem exists, but to build a venture that can truly scale and help people long-term, it has to be rooted in a viable business model,” Rahul said. “For a startup to be sustainable, you have to validate that the market values the solution enough to invest in it.”
Rahul’s connection to Horn Entrepreneurship began before Summer Founders through the Wednesday evening Venture Development Center Community Sessions. As an international student, he said those gatherings helped him build relationships outside of his academic program and feel more connected to the broader UD community.
“This is actually the first time I got to make friends with local students and people who live here,” Rahul said.
That sense of connection continued into Summer Founders, where Rahul found a supportive cohort of student entrepreneurs working through similar challenges.
“We have become a friendly group in the cohort, close enough that we can sit with each other, talk about what we’re working on, and share our thoughts and ideas,” he said.
Rahul credits Horn with helping him move from observing entrepreneurship to actively building something of his own.
“Horn is where great ideas come to fruition,” he said.
A Shared Lesson
For both teams, Summer Founders has provided time, structure and support to test ideas in a focused way. Prediction Wizard is learning how to turn informal social behavior into a structured, points-based platform. Budge is studying how young adults make spending decisions and where technology can create a useful pause.
Their ventures are different, but both reflect the same entrepreneurial challenge: understanding real human behavior before building the solution.
For students considering entrepreneurship, the founders emphasized the importance of showing up, asking questions and getting involved before everything feels fully figured out.
For students considering entrepreneurship, Jacob, Kyle and Rahul all emphasized the value of putting yourself in the right rooms before everything feels fully figured out. For Jacob, that means showing up to VDC Community Sessions and talking with other founders. Kyle encourages students to stay curious, ask questions and build momentum through conversations with people who have startup experience. Rahul echoed that advice from a different perspective, encouraging students to explore unfamiliar spaces because meaningful connections often happen outside of formal networking environments.
“You make the best connections by exploring what you’re not used to,” Rahul said.
Through Summer Founders, these teams are doing exactly that: exploring, testing and building tools that help people make better decisions.
ABOUT HORN ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Horn Entrepreneurship serves as the creative engine for entrepreneurship education and advancement at the University of Delaware. Currently ranked among the best entrepreneurship programs in the U.S., Horn Entrepreneurship was built and is actively supported by successful entrepreneurs, empowering aspiring innovators as they pursue new ideas for a better world.
