TAMPA — Some startup founders celebrate a big win with champagne. Rima El Brouzi and Mathis Fürst Haugen reach for a Pepsi Max.
It is a small tradition for the co-founders of , a hydration technology startup born at the USF Nault Center for Entrepreneurship. And they have been reaching for plenty of Pepsi Max lately. The pair have turned a problem they witnessed firsthand on the ĐÜèAVĂâ·Ń soccer fields into a growing company, collecting more than $20,000 in nondilutive capital, attracting early investment and advancing from university startup competitions to an international stage.
Now, the founders are preparing for their biggest pitch yet.
This month, Syp was selected as one of 20 finalists from 39,000 applicants to compete in Los Angeles in early September in the , hosted by Alibaba, for a $200,000 prize.
For two founders who built their company while balancing college, athletics and countless iterations of pitch decks, the moment offered a chance to appreciate their journey.
“It’s honestly surreal,” El Brouzi said. “I could go on and on about so many memories I have from the beginning of this journey that it’s almost nostalgic, which is ironic because I still think we’re just getting started.”
“We try to take a brief moment to acknowledge how far we’ve come,” Haugen said. “My mom taught me to always celebrate wins, no matter the size, with a Pepsi Max, so we drink a few of those together from time to time.”
A problem hiding in plain sight
The idea behind Syp began on the soccer pitch.
Haugen came to USF from Norway in January 2022 to compete for the Bulls men’s soccer team while studying environmental engineering. An injury ended his freshman season and helped spark the question that would eventually become Syp: With increasingly sophisticated technology tracking nearly every aspect of athletic performance, why was hydration still so difficult to measure?
El Brouzi had been watching the same problem from another vantage point.
Originally from Casablanca, Morocco, she arrived at USF in 2021 to study computer science and spent four years as a student manager with the men’s soccer team. She saw athletes train, recover and compete while hydration remained largely dependent on estimates, reminders and self-reporting.
Together, they saw an opportunity.
Syp is developing a smart sleeve designed to attach to a reusable water bottle and measure fluid intake. Sensors track changes in weight as a person drinks, while temperature and humidity data help account for environmental conditions. That information connects to an app designed to provide personalized hydration recommendations based on factors such as activity, workload and individual characteristics.
The goal is simple: Take something nearly everyone does every day — drink water — and make it measurable.
Rather than asking users to use a proprietary smart bottle, Syp is designed to work with standard reusable bottles. Its broader platform will also integrate with health and fitness technology and give coaches or safety supervisors a way to monitor hydration data across teams or workforces.
Building syp at USF
The Nault Center for Entrepreneurship at the USF Muma College of Business became an important proving ground as the idea for the smart bottle sleeves moved from observation to startup.
Through pitch competitions, entrepreneurial programming and opportunities to put their idea in front of new audiences, the founders repeatedly had to explain what Syp was, why it mattered and why they were the people to build it.
Those experiences also forced them to listen.
“Be prepared to make an enormous number of pitch decks and iterations,” the founders said about their journey. “Stay curious, and always ask people to rip your idea apart — you want as much honest, hard feedback as possible.”
That willingness to return to the drawing board helped Syp accumulate over $20,000 in nondilutive capital while the founders continued developing the company. They have since raised additional early-stage investment, filed provisional patent protection and worked toward pilot-ready hardware.
But the value of showing up went beyond prize money.
“Keep an open mind and say yes to every opportunity, no matter how small or strange it seems,” they said. “Show up, be fully present, give it everything — and you will walk away from that event or pitch competition with either a new contact, a new friend, a new lead or a potential investor.”
For the founders, those rooms became part of the education.
They have since taken Syp beyond campus, with Haugen representing the company at the Florida Venture Forum and Web Summit in Lisbon. The company has also drawn recognition closer to home, including coverage by the Tampa Bay Business Journal and News Channel 8.
In May, Syp reached another milestone when it was accepted into , a nonprofit startup hub and entrepreneurship center.
Two founders, two perspectives
The founders bring distinctly different skill sets to the same problem.
Haugen graduated from USF in May 2026. During his four years as a Division I student-athlete, he was captain of the men’s soccer team. The team reached a Top 25 national ranking and recorded the longest winning streak in school history.
At Syp, he oversees hardware development, fundraising, partnerships and product-market validation.
El Brouzi graduated from USF in May 2025 and is pursuing a master’s degree in computer science with a concentration in artificial intelligence and medical engineering. Her background includes undergraduate AI research at USF and a machine learning internship in Paris.
She leads Syp’s software, AI research and data infrastructure while continuing her connection to USF athletics as a graduate assistant and director of operations.
Their differences have become one of the startup’s strengths.
The founders say entrepreneurship has brought stretches when one person was discouraged and the other had to keep the company moving.
“What surprised me most is that those tough periods usually don’t hit both of us at the same time — they’re staggered,” Haugen said. “So when I’m down, Rima is able to step up and steer the ship, and vice versa.”
“When one of us needs to step back, the other steps forward,” El Brouzi said. “We’ve learned how to push each other, challenge each other, and sometimes just carry the business for each other until we find our footing again.”
Turning momentum into a product
The awards, recognition and funding are milestones, but Syp’s next test will happen outside a pitch room.
The company is working toward a fall 2026 pilot that would put its hardware and software together in athletes’ hands. Getting there has not been seamless.
At the end of the spring semester, Syp’s former engineering partner pulled out because of internal restructuring just as the startup was running low on cash. Product development slowed for several months. The founders kept moving.
They raised additional funding and received their first functional prototypes. At the same time, development continued on the software side, where athletes are already using a beta version of the app and providing feedback.
“Now we’re getting to the part I’ve been waiting for: bringing the hardware and software together into one complete system,” El Brouzi said. “We’ve spent so much time developing these pieces separately that getting to watch the full loop finally work — from an athlete taking a drink, to syp verifying it, to that information appearing in the app and eventually in front of coaches — is going to be a huge milestone for us.”
USF Athletics is among the organizations that have signed a letter of intent for the technology, giving the founders an opportunity to bring the idea back to the environment where it began.
What surprised me most is that those tough periods usually don’t hit both of us at the same time — they’re staggered. So when I’m down, Rima is able to step up and steer the ship, and vice versa.
Mathis FĂĽrst Haugen, Syp co-founder
The company is also exploring a second market beyond athletics: workplace safety. Syp’s founders envision the same technology helping employers monitor hydration in environments where heat and physical exertion can create safety concerns.
The potential applications continue to expand as the founders learn more.
“The other thing that excites us every single morning is how deep this rabbit hole goes,” they said. “The more research we do, the more we discover just how big and layered hydration really is.”
More than the next pitch
There have been moments when El Brouzi and Haugen considered giving up.
Expensive lessons, technical setbacks and periods when progress took longer than expected. Entrepreneurship, they learned, does not move according to a semester schedule or competition deadline.
“Things take time, and at the end of the day, it’s on you to move the business forward,” they said. “Nobody else is going to do the job for you.”
That lesson may explain why Syp’s story has become about more than the competitions entered or the money won.
Each pitch gave the founders another chance to test an assumption, expand their network.
What started with two members of the USF soccer community questioning why athletes could track so much about their bodies except how much they were actually drinking has grown into a startup preparing to put functioning technology in users’ hands.
El Brouzi is still at USF, pursuing her master’s degree and working with athletics. Haugen has moved from student-athlete to USF graduate and full-time entrepreneur. Together, they are carrying an idea developed in the university’s entrepreneurial program into its next stage.
And now Los Angeles is waiting.
Whatever happens on that stage, the founders already know what comes afterward.
Maybe a Pepsi Max. Then onto the next milestone.