BETHLEHEM, Pa. — A team of students from Moravian Academy has locked down funding for a new AI-powered sustainability venture aimed at reducing construction runoff.
Solvis, an AI-powered system that helps construction companies detect and reduce runoff before they are subject to environmental violations, was developed by Aveer Chadha, Qayn Jaffer and Nihil Skandan, and has obtained funding from two pitch presentations in 2025.
A pitch presentation secured a $10,000 National Society of High School Scholars grant, followed by another presentation at Penn State’s Great Valley that which augmented the pot.
The Be More Fund operated similar to a "Shark Tank"-like competition at NSHSS’ Scholars Day in Atlanta, where competitors presented their projects to a panel of judges. Five winners were selected to each receive a $10,000 grant.
“So with those two wins together, we're now ready and looking forward to building in 2026,” Chadha said.
Going into 2026, the team is looking to grow the venture into a tool that can assist developers and environmentalists by detecting and alerting them to runoff, allowing construction crews to mitigate issues before they lead to fines and contamination.
Improving construction
As Chadha put it, the original concept came about in a “pretty random and spontaneous” fashion.
“We were looking to create some sort of business, or some sort of idea, some conceptual idea, for a few entrepreneurship competitions that we were looking to compete in. And so we decided to do a brainstorming session at Lehigh University, and we weren't really finding many ideas,” Chadha said.
“So we just decided to go take a walk outside, and we saw a construction site; I believe they were doing some construction on one of the buildings. And we saw a stream from that construction site filled with wood chips and other hazardous materials, and we didn't really think much of it at that time.”
“But then, after we got back into the room, started brainstorming a little bit more. We had nothing again, and so we decided to research if [the runoff] could have potentially meant anything, if that happened more than what we had saw, because that was our first time seeing it. And in in that we were able to find that, according to some reports, construction can lead to upwards of 40% of water pollution in the United States.”
Chadha and his friends said that revelation galvanized them to put their skills together and find a solution, as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency fined more than 13,000 construction companies for waste runoff violations in 2023 alone.
On top of the water pollution, construction contributes to about 50% of climate change.
And due to the fact that monitoring practices for construction are predominantly reactive, Chadha and his partners felt it was time for something more proactive.
"We're not only helping the construction companies avoid EPA fines, but we're also making sure that construction is much less environmentally harmful.”Aveer Chadha, Moravian Academy student
The flagship device, Solvis Pure, uses a Raspberry Pi microcomputer and a machine learning model trained on nearly 18,000 images to identify runoff materials with 91.2% accuracy. The data is sent to the Solvis mobile app, which provides real-time EPA compliance alerts.
“And within the Solvis mobile app, construction companies can be notified of how much runoff they have for each material," Chadha said. "So we covered water, soil, hazardous waste and other such materials, and you get those reports as line graphs, as a construction company. So you can view the line graphs and see how much runoff you have already what the threshold is for the EPA, and if you're close to that threshold.”
“Because obviously, after you cross that threshold, you're at the risk of being fined. So we give them the proactive step to mitigate their runoff before they're at the risk of being fined, and if they are past that threshold, or approaching that threshold, the app will send a series of burst notifications every 30 minutes until the camera does detect a significant decrease in that runoff.”
“So with both solutions together, we're not only helping the construction companies avoid EPA fines, but we're also making sure that construction is much less environmentally harmful.”
Strong support
Solvis is being piloted by five construction companies, and is supported by Penn State’s Launchbox startup accelerator, which assists with patent work and early funding.
The venture has earned national recognition, including first place at DECA’s International Career Development Conference and honors from the Conrad Challenge, Blue Ocean Competition and the Diamond Challenge.
Asked if the team intended to parlay this victory into a career, Chadha said “It’s definitely very possible for all of us.”
“I know that we will most likely be splitting up for college, but we are determined to continue building if it works out,” Chadha said.
“We're kind of approaching it with the mindset of ‘We'll put our best foot forward try and build something that really is beneficial for the community and ourselves’, and if it works out, it's great. But we do have a lot of time to sort of refine our product, also find our own career interests and expand on them in college.”
