A trip to Disneyland and a childhood dream set Kellogg masters student Angie Mercurio (McCormick ’17) on a path to innovation. Her love for Disney’s animatronics and storytelling through technology eventually led to a third place finish in VentureCat, Northwestern’s annual student startup competition.
Mercurio’s startup, nLab, is a pocket-sized electronics lab with an interactive educational platform. She said she wanted to help others gain the hands-on education in robotics and engineering needed to succeed in the professional world.
The VentureCat 2025 competition took place in May, supported by NU’s center for student entrepreneurship, The Garage. It featured student-created companies competing across five industry tracks for a non-dilutive cash prize of over $175,000. Mercurio won a total of $30,000 through the competition.
Mercurio entered the 2025 VentureCat competition hoping to grow her company and bring nLab to a wider audience. nLab made it to the finals as the Wildcard Winner, winning third place and the Audience Favorite Award.
McCormick Prof. John Greene (Kellogg ’08) was one of Mercurio’s pitch coaches and helped Mercurio shape the many elements of nLab into a succinct pitch for the competition. He said that an important aspect of a successful startup is insight from personal experience, what he called an “earned secret.”
“In (Mercurio’s) case, she had had a personal experience and kind of experienced sort of pain points and friction herself,” Greene said. “She was able to say, ‘Oh, this needs to change. And this can change on a very big scale.’”
In 2016, Mercurio came to NU for her masters degree, entering the Engineering Design Innovation Program where she encountered the initial version of nLab for the first time.
“It completely changed my life. It allowed me to gain the practical knowledge that I wanted to learn,” Mercurio said. “I was able to take it home with me and pace myself and learn on my own time. And that helped me build confidence.”
McCormick Prof. Nick Marchuk, co-founder of nLab, said he started using the lab kits when he could not fit all of his students in one lab. The kits he provided included all the materials they would need to work on assignments wherever they were.
As the product, originally called nScope, was being tested by NU students, Mercurio saw its impact firsthand, and it gave way to a bigger idea.
“Angie looked at (the lab kits) and said, ‘Why can’t we bring this to more people?’” Marchuk said. “Her idea was, let’s get this outside of the college system and see if other people want to do it.”
Mercurio said the nLab she saw used at NU were made “by engineers for engineers.” She wanted to make it more accessible and turn it into something that anyone could use, from artists and creatives to students studying technology.
With this goal in mind, Mercurio decided to quit her job in product management and return to NU to study at Kellogg and launch the company.
In moving forward with nLab as a startup, Merchuk emphasized that the original product could not be mass produced and sold on its own. There was an important “second half” that Mercurio brought in: teaching.
The co-founders initially started making videos to go along with the lab kits, with Marchuk writing the scripts and Mercurio editing them before filming. They also hired experts in content creation to help them make fun and engaging videos that many different people could enjoy while maintaining educational value.
“There’s so many jobs out there that require data center technicians, electricians, engineers, and there’s not enough people, and the reason being that learning electronics right now sucks,” Mercurio said. “We’re just trying to close the gap between all of these people who have this incredible potential to contribute to the growing world of technology.”
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