Adit Gupta is a current PhD student at Drexel University’s College of Computing & Informatics (CCI), continuing his studies in the Computer Science department after completing his undergraduate degree at Drexel in 2019 (BS software engineering).
“I came to Drexel because I knew I would get a lot of diverse experiences in the form of co-ops, and I made sure to work in four or five different industries with multiple internships and co-ops,” Gupta said, “One of the things that Drexel does really well is it gives you a full platter of opportunities that might exist in the city [of Philadelphia].”
A tense experience during the COVID-19 pandemic forced Gupta to draw on everything he’d learned at Drexel to save his family’s business. Gupta and a friend countered a pandemic-related fall-off in foot traffic at the family’s store with their company Lula Convenience. Lula Convenience provides convenience store delivery software, and Gupta is the cofounder and CEO.
“When the pandemic hit, the whole world shut down overnight. So did my parent’s convenience store,” Gupta said. “With the knowledge I had, I worked with my cofounder Tom to build Lula to help folks like my parents who owned stores that were shutting down to be able to deliver and have an additional source of revenue during that time.”
Emerging from its early days amid the global pandemic, Lula has expanded to serve more than 150,000 U.S. convenience stores and has earned multiple rounds of funding from top investors.
“Every experience, whether a good one or a bad one, is a new learning opportunity,” said Gupta.
Gupta started his journey to tech founder and PhD student from an unlikely place: a business major with no coding know-how.
“When I first started at Drexel, I didn’t know how to write a single line of code,” he said.
After switching to CCI, Gupta learned how to build projects from experience and write code for others for free.
“CCI and the classes helped me really understand how to code from the very fundamentals,” Gupta said.