Study abroad to global solutions: Evardi Energy grows from SCET’s Global Entrepreneurship and Innovation Program
Could one summer in Portugal change the trajectory of millions of lives? The co-founders of Evardi Energy, who met during the 2025 Global Entrepreneurship and Innovation (GEI) study abroad program, are doing just that with their AI-based startup solving worldwide power outages.
Diva Bhartesh Shah (Economics and Cognitive Science ‘26), Aarya Borele (Chemical Engineering ‘26), and Evan Davis (Economics, Computer Science and Philosophy ‘26) have known each other since their freshman year of college, but it wasn’t until talking at the European Innovation Academy in Porto, Portugal that they began sharing the ideas that shaped Evardi. Now about to graduate, the founders are preparing to transition from students to full-time entrepreneurs, backed by UC Regents funding.
“[GEI] was the most exciting thing I’ve ever done. Whatever happens in the future, I want to work on something that’s just as exciting to me.” – Aarya Borele
Both Diva and Aarya praised the GEI program as a transformative place to learn about the startup world. Here are four things they highlighted that make GEI not just an academic certificate, but a lifelong resource.
Hands-on Learning
“One of the most valuable things to me was having committed time over the summer to solely focus on learning about startups and new skills,” Diva said. “When I learn something new, I get overwhelmed, so having [guidance] and being immersed in talking to people from all over the world helped frame startups in a positive light that made them easier to learn about.”
“Being in Berkeley, you hear about [startups] all the time, but a really big realization was that this is a problem you’re solving, more than just something you’re building to put it out there,” Aarya added. “Ken [Singer, SCET Managing Director] really emphasized working with people from different cultures and sticking to the team, even when things don’t go right.”
Aarya and Diva’s teams both worked on sustainability startups, picking up lessons that they carry to Evardi today.
Technical Rigor
For Diva, learning to design a startup was the missing piece to solving a problem she’s been reckoning with since her childhood in Nairobi, Kenya.
“The grid in Kenya is unreliable, we get blackouts very often, and that leads to things like students not being able to go to school and hospitals having power outages,” she said. “These are issues I’ve been around for my whole life, and after talking to Aarya and Evan, it’s been really cool to see how we can use new progressions in AI to make the grid more efficient.”
Though Diva was passionate about this issue before GEI, she says started with “barely any experience with business at all.”
“I thought entrepreneurship was just selling a one-hit wonder,” she recounted. “Then I did [GEI] and I realized it’s an actual thing you can get funding for, and you don’t need millions of dollars to make things happen.”
It was only after going in with an open mind and meeting other sustainability-focused students that she was inspired to start innovating on her own.
Aarya shared that GEI’s technical instruction helped her in a similar way.
“I grew up in India,” she explained, “so I experienced this same problem in a different context. My grandfathers work in a farm in Dhanaj, which is a really small village. With a lot of expansion happening in India, there’s a big issue of blackouts and the grid just not being equipped to handle new architecture and the investment in renewable energy.”
“My project, a caulk-based technology to reduce harmful noise produced by underwater construction, taught me how to deal with new technologies and heavy infrastructure. A big problem for us at Evardi is that grids are really old, and heavy infrastructure is hard to change. We’re making it a lot more efficient by adding new technologies, and having had that experience gives me a lot more context for the work we’re doing today.”
Cultural Immersion
What makes GEI unlike any other entrepreneurship program is being surrounded by a range of fresh perspectives.
“My team had one or two students from the U.S., and everyone else was from across Europe,” Diva said. “We wanted to pilot our startup in Portugal, where things work very differently than in the U.S. Even though I wanted my opinion to be heard, I realized when I needed to step back and let the Portuguese students explain how things happened. That cultural immersion helped us pilot with a few companies where American strategies wouldn’t have worked as well.”
During the program, Diva’s team designed an app mapping out electric vehicle chargers in Portugal. Though it’s completely different from her current project, she said, “Evardi is operating all over the world right now, so learning how to do research, speak to different communities, and address the hot topic of sustainability from a birds-eye perspective helped me transition into the grid space.”
Part of this is learning to communicate with people from a variety of backgrounds.
“SCET has defined so much of how we communicate and make difficult decisions,” Aarya said. “We had a small fight within our team where we disagreed on the direction of our company. I think about it now because when we’re building [Evardi], we make sure to always have an opposing perspective, even if we are mostly in agreement, just to make sure we’ve considered everything.”
Lifelong Connections
What happens after GEI? Aarya shared: “I reached out to Ken a little after the program because I was feeling lost – it’s scary to work on a startup full-time – and he was great in giving me guidance for that.”
Diva expanded on the value of the connections she made both through this course and other SCET programming. “When we started Evardi, we joined the Berkeley Accelerator in Cognitive Science (BASICS) to maximize the resources we could get,” she said. “We were put into contact with [David] Whitney, and our professors, Uri Korisky and [Michael] Jacobs, also helped us reach out to more people. Through that, we were able to contact a lawyer and work on patenting our product. Berkeley has been a huge support in finding advisors to talk to. A lot of our model hasn’t been done before, so it’s a lot of deep research that we needed guidance on. We’re grateful for all the support.”
With its three founders graduating college this year, Evardi is ready to become a full-time venture. The company recently incorporated and is working to provide deliverables for its existing clients and pilots as they move into a more corporate mindset – what Diva describes as “housekeeping, to make sure that in the future we’re set up to be successful.”
Reflecting on this chapter, both Aarya and Diva expressed immense gratitude for their opportunities at Berkeley.
“I am super grateful for GEI,” Diva said. “I would not have wanted entrepreneurship to be my career path until I did that. Ken really inspires us to this day.”
Aarya continued, “It was the most exciting thing I’ve ever done. Whatever happens in the future, I want to work on something that’s just as exciting to me.”
Could one summer in Portugal change the trajectory of millions of lives? The co-founders of Evardi Energy, who met during the 2025 Global Entrepreneurship and Innovation (GEI) study abroad program, are doing just that with their AI-based startup solving worldwide power outages.
Diva Bhartesh Shah (Economics and Cognitive Science ‘26), Aarya Borele (Chemical Engineering ‘26), and Evan Davis (Economics, Computer Science and Philosophy ‘26) have known each other since their freshman year of college, but it wasn’t until talking at the European Innovation Academy in Porto, Portugal that they began sharing the ideas that shaped Evardi. Now about to graduate, the founders are preparing to transition from students to full-time entrepreneurs, backed by UC Regents funding.
“[GEI] was the most exciting thing I’ve ever done. Whatever happens in the future, I want to work on something that’s just as exciting to me.” – Aarya Borele
Both Diva and Aarya praised the GEI program as a transformative place to learn about the startup world. Here are four things they highlighted that make GEI not just an academic certificate, but a lifelong resource.
Hands-on Learning
“One of the most valuable things to me was having committed time over the summer to solely focus on learning about startups and new skills,” Diva said. “When I learn something new, I get overwhelmed, so having [guidance] and being immersed in talking to people from all over the world helped frame startups in a positive light that made them easier to learn about.”
“Being in Berkeley, you hear about [startups] all the time, but a really big realization was that this is a problem you’re solving, more than just something you’re building to put it out there,” Aarya added. “Ken [Singer, SCET Managing Director] really emphasized working with people from different cultures and sticking to the team, even when things don’t go right.”
Aarya and Diva’s teams both worked on sustainability startups, picking up lessons that they carry to Evardi today.
Technical Rigor
For Diva, learning to design a startup was the missing piece to solving a problem she’s been reckoning with since her childhood in Nairobi, Kenya.
“The grid in Kenya is unreliable, we get blackouts very often, and that leads to things like students not being able to go to school and hospitals having power outages,” she said. “These are issues I’ve been around for my whole life, and after talking to Aarya and Evan, it’s been really cool to see how we can use new progressions in AI to make the grid more efficient.”
Though Diva was passionate about this issue before GEI, she says started with “barely any experience with business at all.”
“I thought entrepreneurship was just selling a one-hit wonder,” she recounted. “Then I did [GEI] and I realized it’s an actual thing you can get funding for, and you don’t need millions of dollars to make things happen.”
It was only after going in with an open mind and meeting other sustainability-focused students that she was inspired to start innovating on her own.
Aarya shared that GEI’s technical instruction helped her in a similar way.
“I grew up in India,” she explained, “so I experienced this same problem in a different context. My grandfathers work in a farm in Dhanaj, which is a really small village. With a lot of expansion happening in India, there’s a big issue of blackouts and the grid just not being equipped to handle new architecture and the investment in renewable energy.”
“My project, a caulk-based technology to reduce harmful noise produced by underwater construction, taught me how to deal with new technologies and heavy infrastructure. A big problem for us at Evardi is that grids are really old, and heavy infrastructure is hard to change. We’re making it a lot more efficient by adding new technologies, and having had that experience gives me a lot more context for the work we’re doing today.”
Cultural Immersion
What makes GEI unlike any other entrepreneurship program is being surrounded by a range of fresh perspectives.
“My team had one or two students from the U.S., and everyone else was from across Europe,” Diva said. “We wanted to pilot our startup in Portugal, where things work very differently than in the U.S. Even though I wanted my opinion to be heard, I realized when I needed to step back and let the Portuguese students explain how things happened. That cultural immersion helped us pilot with a few companies where American strategies wouldn’t have worked as well.”
During the program, Diva’s team designed an app mapping out electric vehicle chargers in Portugal. Though it’s completely different from her current project, she said, “Evardi is operating all over the world right now, so learning how to do research, speak to different communities, and address the hot topic of sustainability from a birds-eye perspective helped me transition into the grid space.”
Part of this is learning to communicate with people from a variety of backgrounds.
“SCET has defined so much of how we communicate and make difficult decisions,” Aarya said. “We had a small fight within our team where we disagreed on the direction of our company. I think about it now because when we’re building [Evardi], we make sure to always have an opposing perspective, even if we are mostly in agreement, just to make sure we’ve considered everything.”
Lifelong Connections
What happens after GEI? Aarya shared: “I reached out to Ken a little after the program because I was feeling lost – it’s scary to work on a startup full-time – and he was great in giving me guidance for that.”
Diva expanded on the value of the connections she made both through this course and other SCET programming. “When we started Evardi, we joined the Berkeley Accelerator in Cognitive Science (BASICS) to maximize the resources we could get,” she said. “We were put into contact with [David] Whitney, and our professors, Uri Korisky and [Michael] Jacobs, also helped us reach out to more people. Through that, we were able to contact a lawyer and work on patenting our product. Berkeley has been a huge support in finding advisors to talk to. A lot of our model hasn’t been done before, so it’s a lot of deep research that we needed guidance on. We’re grateful for all the support.”
With its three founders graduating college this year, Evardi is ready to become a full-time venture. The company recently incorporated and is working to provide deliverables for its existing clients and pilots as they move into a more corporate mindset – what Diva describes as “housekeeping, to make sure that in the future we’re set up to be successful.”
Reflecting on this chapter, both Aarya and Diva expressed immense gratitude for their opportunities at Berkeley.
“I am super grateful for GEI,” Diva said. “I would not have wanted entrepreneurship to be my career path until I did that. Ken really inspires us to this day.”
Aarya continued, “It was the most exciting thing I’ve ever done. Whatever happens in the future, I want to work on something that’s just as exciting to me.”