Purdue University First-Year Engineering (FYE) student Tolen Schreid from Newburgh, Ind., is taking a gap year to move his tech company forward, thanks to a hefty influx of venture capital by tech accelerator investors. 

Schreid is one of the youngest entrepreneurs to receive a financial nod for his start-up company Caseflood.ai from Y Combinator, LLC,  which is responsible for the creation of more than 4,000 companies including OpenAI, Twitch, Doordash, Instacart, Reddit, Coinbase, AirBnB, and more. His artificial intelligence (AI), open model platform centers around the legal profession, with initial service offerings focused on a multilingual AI receptionist for lawyers, designed to effectively qualify potential clients. Caseflood.ai tools will answer phone calls, ask questions, and gather data from potential clients to save solo or dual practitioners time and money.

Schreid and his high school friends created the Caseflood.ai prototype that won a statewide entrepreneurial competition, which then led to an eight-minute pitch interview with Y Combinator and its subsequent $500k investment at a $7M valuation. Before the pitch, they were able to run their ideas by a handful of people who had already gone through the process. “Other entrepreneurs are willing to help as long as they believe you are dedicated to your idea,” Schreid said. “Being young isn’t held against you, as many of the people founding new tech startups are in their teens and twenties.”

When asked what it takes to become a tech entrepreneur, Schreid said his journey began in 4^th grade with an interest in Scratch, a free, online programming language that allows participants to create their own interactive stories, games, and animations. “I spent a lot of time dragging and dropping little blocks around to make characters fit on the screen,” Schreid said. “Then I moved on to building websites and continued to develop my programming skills. If I didn’t know how to do something like integrate a chatbot, I looked it up online.”

Because software isn’t usually able to be patented, entrepreneurs need to move faster than everybody else and that requires time and the opportunity to dedicate exclusively to the product, hence the temporary break from college. Schreid and his company co-founders will spend the next year in San Francisco, taking a course required by Y Combinator, then competing for an additional $2M in seed money. Y Combinator’s initial investment allows them to build additional features into the product, including legal research and case value interpretation.

When he returns to Purdue in the spring of 2026, Schreid will enter the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics because, in addition to creating something that he hopes will become a staple in tech, Scheid really wants to build rockets and eventually become a professor.

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