After a first-year CEE class project on sidewalk repair cost estimates inspired Brandon Yates to launch DeepWalk Research, a startup focused on automating civil engineering inspections, Yates and his partner Anshuh Shah have found themselves on the 2025 Forbes 30 under 30 list.
DeepWalk tackles a challenge Yates learned about when he was introduced to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) during that freshman class in 2019: the sheer volume of sidewalk assessments that every municipality is required to perform in order to identify where their sidewalks are inaccessible to people with disabilities. These assessments must include curb ramp inspections, which can take an engineer up to 15 minutes each to perform.
According to Yates, who reached out to over 100 city engineers, ADA coordinators and consultants for input, the project is an enormous – and expensive – challenge for many cities. Not only do these inspections require a significant investment of time and personnel – New York City alone has over 200,000 ramps, Seattle has over 40,000 ramps and even Champaign has over 13,000 ramps – but failure to meet ADA requirements can cost cities hundreds of millions of dollars in legal settlements. In the case of Los Angeles and New York, each city’s legal obligation exceeds $1 billion.
With this challenge still in mind at the conclusion of his class, Yates recruited a friend in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Shah, and they began to train a machine-learning model to identify sidewalk panels. Their efforts would eventually lead to development of DeepWalk, a mobile application that is able to turn a 30-second video of a curb ramp into a 3D model, check if it meets ADA requirements and automatically fill out an inspection report.
“I don’t think a start-up like this could have happened anywhere else. DeepWalk is a product of the engineering and innovation culture here.”
“With the DeepWalk app, a single intern will be able to perform over 200 inspections a day,” Yates said. “This allows municipalities to take a strong first step in avoiding or meeting the requirements of these lawsuits.”
Over the next three years as they developed their app, Yates and his partners – Shah, plus two students from the departments of Computer Science and Physics – took advantage of the entrepreneurial resources available to students at the University of Illinois, including the Technology Entrepreneur Center’s COZAD start-up competition and iVenture Accelerator.
As of Yates's graduation in May 2021, they had raised $71,000 through these types of student startup programs and competitions.
“The University of Illinois has an extremely strong entrepreneurial ecosystem,” Yates said. “It has world-class computer science and civil engineering programs, a history of groundbreaking research, and a huge amount of resources devoted to supporting entrepreneurship. The fact that we as an undergraduate-led startup company raised over $70,000 in funding without leaving campus speaks for itself.”
Yates also benefited from generous informal mentorship from faculty and alumni. Professor Jeffery R. Roesler, who leads the project-based course for first year students, not only introduced Yates to a Ph.D. student who served as an early technical adviser for the DeepWalk team, but also connected him to his wider civil engineering network including industry professionals – people they would not normally be able to talk to, Yates said.
“I don’t think I would have gotten introduced to any of this stuff if I wasn’t at the University of Illinois,” he said. “I don’t think a start-up like this could have happened anywhere else. DeepWalk is a product of the engineering and innovation culture here.”
Forbes applauded Yates and Shah's work in transportation and mobility, and the growth of the DeepWalk platform, which has now raised $2 million. According to DeepWalk's website, over 70 municipalities nationwide currently use the software for ADA compliance.