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Circle: Fall 2025 Burton D. Morgan Finalist
Circle was a Top 10 Fall 2025 Burton D. Morgan finalist addressing university STEM learning and retention with course-level AI contextual intelligence and intervention.
Historical finalist profile — Fall 2025. This page was published in 2026 from Purdue and organizer sources.
Circle was one of the Top 10 standout venture concepts in Purdue's Fall 2025 37th Burton D. Morgan Venture Concept Competition and received a $3,000 Standout Concept prize.
Team
The organizer's finalist announcement names Devak Charapalle and Chakravarthy Mallarapu. Purdue's later competition archive lists Devak Charapalle and Chuck Mallarapu. Because those records clearly refer to the same Circle finalist alongside the same cofounder, this page preserves both public name forms rather than silently rewriting the source.
What Circle was building
Purdue's competition archive describes Circle as addressing a university STEM learning gap that can become a STEM retention gap.
The concept used AI to provide course-level contextual intelligence and intervention, with universities as the target customer. In other words, the pitch was not a generic education chatbot: it focused on helping institutions identify and respond to learning problems that can contribute to students leaving STEM pathways.
Competition result
Circle finished in the Top 10 from a field Purdue reported at 120 teams and nearly 250 students. It did not place in the Top 3, but Purdue lists Circle among the seven additional Top 10 teams that each received a $3,000 Standout Concept prize.
Sources
- Purdue's Burton D. Morgan competition archive
- Fall 2025 finalist announcement
- Fall 2025 finalists overview