Swimming in the pool of entrepreneurship

Anna Liebenberg ( BASc ’22) and Shreshth Mehra ( BASc ’22) bonded over a mutual love of fitness.

Both, however, experienced moments of isolation in their athletic pursuits. For Mehra, it was when he was training for Iron Man, a long-distance triathlon event. For Liebenberg, it was when she was lifting weights at the gym without help from a personal trainer.

During his training, Mehra sought out Liebenberg’s expertise as a swim coach to help with his swimming skills, and the two started asking themselves an important question: could wearable technology provide feedback on optimal training form, much like a coach would?

“There’s a lot of tech being developed for triathlons, but nothing really for swimming ... to give you feedback on the quality of your movement,” Mehra says. “That's where it started from, and very soon, we realized that this technology is something which can be adapted to a lot of different things.”

Realizing the technology's potential, Mehra and Liebenberg founded TrainPro. They went on to win a Velocity $5K pitch competition and created a prototype in Velocity’s digital space on campus. Now that they have graduated, the two are working full-time on TrainPro at Velocity in downtown Kitchener.

“Velocity provided us a lot of support on campus, so we knew that working [at Velocity] post-graduation would be great as well,” Liebenberg says. “It's good to get a place and just start working as soon as we graduate, and we've already made a lot of different connections in the [Kitchener-Waterloo] area so it's nice to be able to build on that.”

Co-op and Velocity strengthens entrepreneurial muscle

Mehra and Liebenberg’s drive for success in engineering and entrepreneurship comes from genuine curiosity.

Mehra’s passion for both started young, seeing his father run a manufacturing business. Liebenberg’s interest was sparked during her time at Waterloo.

“[Beyond my studies] I didn't really have any idea of what I wanted to do, but having co-ops at different startups really piqued my interest in entrepreneurship,” Liebenberg says. “And then being friends with Shreshth, because he was really interested in it, [my interest] grew from there.”

In the early stages of TrainPro, when it was still an idea dedicated to swim coaching technology, they applied to Velocity $5K for the first time. While the application was unsuccessful in getting them to the semi-finals, it opened the door to the Velocity community and allowed them to tap into the entrepreneurship network on campus.

That led them to pivot the idea to develop technology to serve the larger fitness market and win the Velocity $5K in the fall of 2022.

“We received really good advice, specifically about going and talking to potential customers and we became much more informed,” Mehra says.

As Mehra and Liebenberg headed into their final year of studies, TrainPro started getting more traction. And as the desire to focus their energy full-time on the business grew, they took advantage of the University’s entrepreneurship courses to juggle course loads and business development. They completed the Foundations of Venture Creation course at Conrad School of Entrepreneurship and Business.

“That really helped us,” Liebenberg says. “We were able to just work on our startup as [part of] the course project.”

Mehra says co-op terms were also integral to sharpening the tools for entrepreneurial success.

“A lot of the skills we need aren't specifically taught in class, but I learned from having a wide variety of co-ops,” he says. “It allowed me to build skills that really helped us make the prototype early on by ourselves because we had some amount of knowledge about each element involved.”

As they work hard on further developing their business, Mehra continues to draw on his experience training for the Iron Man triathlon, as he sees important parallels between entrepreneurship and sports.

“One big one is perseverance and the value of investing time and effort now for a future result.”