EMU Digital Summer Clinic: lacuum - 3/20/26

It's Ann Arbor's 1071. Good morning. My name is Scott Vertical and I've got a very special guest here in the studio as we've been doing these last couple of Friday mornings. Each year in conjunction with Ann Arbor Spark, EMU's Center for Digital Engagement offers paid digital summer clinic internship and it enables interns to gain practical experience and tech and digital marketing, connect with mentors and industry professionals and it's out of EMU. But interns come from universities all across the country and they're paired with Spark tech startups to do digital marketing work and here representing one of those Spark tech startups is Amor Abugeta. He's the founder and CEO of LACUME. Good morning, Amor. Good morning. Thank you, Scott. Happy to be here. I'm really glad that you're here today because we were talking a little bit off year about your company and about how excited you were to have these interns along with you. I feel like I'm overthinking how to say it. It's LACUME, like vacuum with an L. That's what it is. LACUME. LACUME. Tell everybody what your startup does. I think it's fascinating. So I mean, I wanted to look into an area where how can I clean the water. I've seen water filled with algae with invasor species, plastics and like there's a lot of work need to be done and like how to scale that in a scalable manner. Sure. And I brought in like, hey, I'm good with robotics. I've done a lot of autonomous stuff. Let me bring in some of this knowledge, applied specifically for this application and be able to scale it to have a better water cleaner without the use of chemicals and such. Yeah. So you make robots that clean water. That's what it is. I mean, it's that simple, right? Yeah. But I mean, that's a simple concept, but it's not an easy thing to do. Right. I mean, it takes a lot of a lot of brains to do. Yeah. I partner up with the University of Michigan Naval Architecture and Marine Maritime Engineering or Name, the acronym for it. My partner is Professor Monique. A Faris is a professor there. And him and his team, along with my team, we work and develop and test and you know, we've done a lot of field tests. It takes a minute to roll this up. It's not a curfew. No, no, I can imagine. And you do R&D in consulting as well, right? So I mean, like we as a company, we offer two things like we're as a startup. We've done a lot of work and and how is there a feasibility in whatever you want to do? Right. So we offer that kind of market analysis and such. But also from a tick side, we bring in this robotics in different fields, not just specifically for the Marine. You know, we like to be hardware agnostic, I guess the word. Sure. But you know, we work with people with land robots with air robots, all kind of things because the core knowledge is difficult to achieve. But it's semi-common between those things. Gotcha. All right. And so to do all of these things, you have gotten help from the digital summer clinic intern. You had a couple of folks working with you? Absolutely. No, I do want to put a good word for Ann Arbor's Park. Like I would not be here without their help. Oh my goodness. You know, from the day one, they helped me out. They supported me. They gave me, you know, funds to work and connections and communications. They helped me a lot. And one of those, you know, services was the summer internship program. Sure. We had two members. Their name was Claire and Muhammad. And they helped me. Helped us a lot with building up the messaging of the company. Okay. Basically the website like him that AI. Oh, yeah. Basically build this website for me. Okay. They've done pitch videos. They've done a lot of media kind of coverage. Honestly, they've done a wonderful job. And the thing is, as any other founder, you really don't have time to mentor these people. Right. Like you just tell them like, hey, do something. And then you walk away. And then you hope they're able to do it. Right. And they they stood up. They were amazing. They did the work. That's really something. And you know, and you said that the spark was with you every step of the way. Yeah, from day one. I mean, I I worked with spark many, many years ago, 10 years ago on a different project. And they helped me then. And I learned my mistakes. And then through the years, I've been trying different things. And they were always supportive. Whether it worked or not, they understand the rest behind it. But obviously I gained more experience. And now hopefully this will grow and make a large company. So yeah. Wow. Yeah. It's really something. And what get one of the thing that gets me is not only is that you get all this support. And you get a couple of interns to help you out. It doesn't cost you anything, right? That's the thing. That's a beauty thing. Yeah. You know, I think it's a state funded and they they help us out with with grants and support. And even today, you know, internships is one program. But I do have other programs that I'm active with them. That they help me bring in experts and in the field. And they pay for it. Wow. Isn't that something? Yeah. It really is. And so you said one of your interns worked on the website. What other kind of thing? Like you said, you're a founder, you're CEO, you're like, look, I got this idea. I'm going to make a thing. And you don't always think about all these little things. Like, oh, somebody's going to make a website. Did you find that there were other things that they were helping out with as well? Yeah. I mean, they, they, whatever I throw, I'll tell you the funny things that the very first day they worked. I was in the field in Canton. I was cleaning Heritage Park there and I told them you guys need to show up there. And they actually helped me clean the lakes. They collected debris and put it on the, on the truss. Like they were looking at me. It was like, is this what we're going to do? No, no, no. I wanted to get to your hands dirty with this to understand what we're doing. Right. To get more experience. And they stood up to it. And they helped. And they, you know, so whatever I gave them assignments, like as I said, they've done the website. They've done video pitches. They've done, you know, texting. They, they were, they stood up. Whatever, even if they don't know that they're young people who are very fast to learn and with all the AI tools that can like, you know, help them out. Yeah. They were amazing. So from, from a company's point of view, obviously, it seems very beneficial to have these folks around. What would you say to somebody who's thinking about becoming an intern themselves? They will learn a lot. I mean, recently, one of the members, one of the interns reached out to me because she was applying for another job. And they wanted recommendation from us. And I immediately jumped on it, called the other company, put in the good word for her. And, and she was very happy. Like she, she had, like, I hope she was happy because in the emails, she's like, you know, would love to meet again. And hopefully in the future we can work on that's one side. The other side is that they can, they'll meet all this high-paced, innovative ideas. And it's not like, like, they'll have two months, but it's going to be a full two months. Right. They're going to enjoy it. Okay. Very good. And then, you know, you said, you know, you've had to help with Ann Arbor Spark. You wanted to give a quick shout out to Makerworks as well. That's a big deal. I mean, like, the city of Ann Arbor is a great place to be in to start companies, whether like you're doing software, Ann Arbor Spark is the place to talk to and they help you all kind of things, not just, you know, the tech. When it comes to heart tech, when you need to build stuff, prototype, rapid prototyping, I want to put a good word for Makerworks. They're just, you know, they're a maker space. They're friendly people. They have all the tools. If you're a bit metal, woodworking, city printing, whatever. And they help you. They help you to work there. And it's just a wonderful place to be as well. That's wonderful. So we're talking to Emma Abugeta. He is the founder and CEO of Lackuum. And you're talking about maybe having a name change to your company as well. We're updating in a little bit. Yeah. I mean, so we're going to keep the name Lackuum to focus on the lake vacuum application, the boats, the robots that can clean lakes. But as I said, like we, you know, really our core knowledge is this robotics capabilities. And the boat is just one application to it. So because of that, we actually have some very passionate, fundamental knowledge in there that we can apply it in different applications beyond a boat. Okay. You can do it in aerial drones or land robots or kind of applications. So because of that, and the core core knowledge in there is really based on geometric information, you know, knowledge that was put into the robotics, you know, long story short. But because of this kind of relationship with geometric, we re-nade the company to geo mind, geometric mind. And that's kind of the goal going forward as a roadmap for us. Right. But we're keeping the Lackuum as a core. Right. You know, as one of the many things you will do, of course, hopefully, right. Wonderful. So where, if I want to find out more about Lackuum, what is the website where I go? So we have a couple of things. We have the website, Lackuum.ai, even like him that calm will wrap you to the, the AI. Okay. But we also have a bit more active on the, on the LinkedIn page, like you will see more updates more rapidly in that website as well. So feel free to reach out to me through LinkedIn as well. I'm happy to talk to you. Wonderful. So yeah, Lackuum is LAC UUM, like vacuum with a V, so easy and so cool. It's such a neat concept to him. I think it's so great that you thought of it because not only is it just a neat concept, but you will be cleaning the environment. You know what I mean? I mean, it's so important to be doing that these days. I mean, Michigan has 11,000 lakes. Oh, yeah. Just Michigan. Right. We have, we're blessed in the, in the US with three million lakes and we just can't handle cleaning all those lakes. So we need, we need this help to finish it up. Wonderful. Amber, Abogad, founder and CEO of Lackuum. Thank you so much for coming in today and sharing this information about the EMU Center for Digital Engagement and their digital summer clinic. You can get more information at digitalsummer.clinic and Amber, thanks again for coming in today. I really appreciate it learning more about what you do. Thank you for having me. Mornings with Scott Vertical on Ann Arbor's 1071.