Mike Lovas and Rami Alhamad of PUSH Design Solutions. Image by JOLT.

Mike Lovas, an entrepreneurial fourth-year Industrial Design student at OCAD U is now the Chief Design Officer at PUSH Design Solutions, a startup that he co-founded thanks to seed capital and support from both the JOLT technology accelerator and OCAD U’s Imagination Catalyst.

Lovas (whom you may also recognize as a research assistant in the Mobile Experience Lab and a research coordinator in the Sustainability Office), teamed up with two University of Waterloo mechatronics engineer graduates, Rami Alhamad and Suresh Joshi, last year to work on an idea.

They made rapid progress, and now PUSH, in its current iteration, is an app-enabled fitness device for analyzing, managing and tracking weight training and workout performance. It can attach to an athlete’s wrist or common weight training equipment, and it incorporates smart monitoring and intelligent design so anyone, from a pro athlete to a casual fitness lover can use it.

JOLT, a technology accelerator dedicated to high-growth web and mobile companies, invested $30,000 in seed capital for Lovas’s company, in exchange for six per cent equity. The JOLT program also provides product development support, workshops, business mentorship and workspace in Toronto’s bustling MaRS Commons, home to many other digital entrepreneurs and research initiatives.

OCAD U’s Imagination Catalyst, which helps students take ideas out of the classroom and into the market, provided another infusion of seed capital, along with outreach support, and has also offered workspace.

Lovas and the PUSH team took their app to Launch Festival in San Francisco in March where they met with Silicon Valley-based venture capital firms. They’re now working on a beta version for user testing with weight trainers and varsity teams at the University of Toronto.

“This is an exciting, fast moving thing,” says Lovas. “It’s ambitious because we’re combining product design with hardware, mobile technology, iOS development and a web portal with deep analytics, so there are a lot of moving parts. We’re just going to keep moving ahead.”