One Million Cups hosted by StartingBlock
Wed, Mar 04
|StartingBlock Madison
Hear from two student founders, Mara Zwicker with Substrata and Dev Ahluwalia with Mad Matcher.


Time & Location
Mar 04, 2026, 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM
StartingBlock Madison, 821 E Washington Ave 3rd floor, Madison, WI 53703, USA
About the event
CEO Mara Zwicker and cofounders Joshika Nachiappan and Trinity Krohn have built Substrata. Substrata is a geological intelligence platform that identifies high-performance land for the next generation of data centers. By analyzing subsurface thermal properties, we help operators locate sites where the earth naturally absorbs and dissipates heat more effectively than traditional industrial hubs. Our technology enables "Water-Zero" cooling and higher compute density by turning the ground into a strategic thermal asset.
CEO and founder Dev Ahluwalia will share about Mad Matcher. MadMatcher helps organizations turn duplicated or inconsistent records into a single, trustworthy view of key entities like patients, customers, products, and suppliers, so analytics and AI don’t start from broken data. It tackles a core data integration challenge by reliably linking records across systems without forcing teams to hand-code brittle matching rules or sacrifice accuracy as data scales. Built on 10+ years of University of Wisconsin–Madison research, MadMatcher…