Meet Averent: How Pace Students are Rethinking Video Game Discovery

For independent game developers, creating the game is only part of the challenge. Once the coding, design, testing, and polishing are complete, the creators face a completely different question: How do they find an audience for what they’ve built?

Brennan Moores ’26, a recent graduate of Pace University’s Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems, knows that challenge firsthand as an independent game developer. As he put it, “The one thing that you want to do with your game is share it. You want to get it across the world.”

This is exactly the problem that Averent, a social commerce platform designed to help small, independent game developers and their supporters discover and be discovered, is working to address. Co-founded by Pace student Tyler Yeung, who is pursuing his BA in Computer Science from Seidenberg, and University of Calgary student Rabi Khan, the company aims to improve indie game discoverability, strengthen creator-audience relationships, and complement trusted platforms such as Steam, itch.io, Discord, and game websites.

One thing Pace has allowed me to do is incorporate my startup directly into my education.

Throughout his time at Pace, Yeung and the team have been building Averent and applying everything they’ve learned into developing the platform. “One thing Pace has allowed me to do is incorporate my startup directly into my education,” Yeung said. “In multiple instances, I’ve been able to incorporate Averent directly as part of my coursework, including my Honors Thesis, final projects for multiple software development courses, and working directly with students and faculty, including Dean Chen herself, to push Averent forward. Our team is nearly entirely composed of Pace students and alumni, with many faculty serving as direct mentors and advisors.”

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Faculty mentorship has played a crucial role in Averent’s development. “One of the professors that stood out the most to me was Professor Tom Schmidt,” Yeung added. “I had one of my first-ever classes at Pace with him, discrete math, which is an area I was never very strong in. I was worried this would be a major struggle, but Dr. Schmidt’s teaching motivated me to continue my studies at Seidenberg when I wasn’t too sure about my future in this field.”

Schmidt eventually became Averent’s academic advisor, and as Yeung put it, “he was our gateway into most of the great resources that Pace has to offer.”

As Averent developed, Seidenberg students and alumni with different areas of expertise joined the team. Sapna Naidu (’26), the team’s cybersecurity lead, earned her MS in Cybersecurity from Pace and is now a full-time faculty member at Seidenberg. “My work as a secure full-stack engineer ran alongside my studies and made the coursework click. I could take a concept from class and immediately apply it against real threats and real systems. That loop between classroom and practice is what turned knowledge into instinct,” Naidu said. She added that when she was looking for a cybersecurity program, Seidenberg’s hands-on approach, proximity to industry in New York, and experienced faculty made the difference. “It felt like a place that would prepare me to actually build and defend systems, not just study them.”

Mentorship by faculty ... as well as Pace’s networking events and courses based on industry-level knowledge, were the things that really enhanced my education here and left me feeling prepared for a career.

Sarvesh Shah (MS in Computer Science ’26), the platform’s full-stack cloud engineer, echoed Naidu’s emphasis on faculty mentorship and industry-focused learning as important parts of his Pace experience. “Mentorship by faculty like Dr. Scharff and Dr. Shan, as well as Pace’s networking events and courses based on industry-level knowledge, were the things that really enhanced my education here and left me feeling prepared for a career,” he said.

The Averent team recently completed the Spring 2026 Element 46 Tech Accelerator, a Westchester-based startup accelerator, where they presented at Demo Day. They have since launched the platform and started testing with active beta users. They’ve also joined forces with the Front Yard at Pace University, an entrepreneurial incubator at the Lubin School of Business, as a startup in residence. The partnership gives the team another environment to develop Averent while expanding its connections across the University.

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For Lizi Imedashvili (BS in Information Systems ’26), Averent’s head of growth and business development and a current MS in Data Science student, interdisciplinary experiences at Pace led her to the startup. She also serves as a project manager at Blue CoLab, Seidenberg’s program of training, innovation, and research in real-time water monitoring technologies within the Gale Epstein Center for Technology, Policy, and the Environment, where she met Yeung and learned about Averent. “Joining the team let me apply what I’ve learned, keep growing my skills, and experience what it’s like to build something in a real startup.”

Isaiah Zuppa (BS in Computer Science ’26), the platform’s lead outreach coordinator and full-stack developer, discovered Averent in a software engineering class, which ultimately helped him finish his capstone project: “I got to work on a platform with real-world implications, applying not only my previous knowledge but consistently learning new things that I can confidently say have greatly honed my skills.”

Averent’s collaborative approach has been central to the team’s growth. Rabi Khan, Averent’s co-founder and CTO, recognizes that same spirit of collaboration at the heart of the company’s beginnings. “One of the main things that made me want to work on Averent was Tyler's passion, and I was impressed with his front-end design when he first showed me,” he said. “A cool part of Averent's story is that it started off from us playing Minecraft when I was probably around 10 years old, and it led to the start of a company.”

As the team continues expanding its platform and building relationships with industry partners, Averent captures how people can grow together and build something with the potential to influence an industry when they have an environment that supports hands-on learning and mentorship.