After successfully learning French from a graduate student, Killian said he realized there was a need for a software that gave students a personalized path to language proficiency. From there, Lingco was born.

Lingco Language Labs is a language-learning platform that uses individualized instruction to help students become proficient in foreign languages. 

The digital startup is an Entrepreneurial Eight finalist in the annual Student Startup Madness tournament, an official session at South by Southwest, or SXSW, interactive, where Killian will pitch the company to a panel of entrepreneurs and investors in Austin, Texas March 16.

“I was really surprised,” Killian said. “I know that MSU has fielded a lot of applicants in the past; we have a really strong entrepreneurship program. I was really excited because we had applied last year actually, but we didn’t make it to the final eight."

Killian began to build the business at the MSU Hatch during his junior year, where he met Lingco's co-founders Angie Pope and Andy Bailey.

“Starting your own business, you’re not even sure where to start and that’s the problem when you don’t know what you don’t know," Killian said. "Luckily, I found out through a friend about Michigan State’s Hatch program where you can come to them with just an idea and they would help with a lot of the resources.”

Pope said Lingco’s efficiency is what makes the software important for schools and universities.

“You walk into a classroom and you have 30 or 40 students, whatever you might have, and you’re faced with two options,” Pope said. “I can teach everyone the exact same material the exact same way at the exact same time, or, I can sit down with every student and develop an individual syllabus for every single student. One of them ... could be a little bit ineffective because everyone might need something slightly different, but it’s completely inefficient to develop an individual syllabus for everyone.”

In MSU's French program, Lingco is a tool instructors use to help with long-term retention of vocabulary and pronunciation, French teaching assistant Sarah Brundrett said.

Though students’ pronunciation and retention of the vocabulary were decent, Brundrett said Lingco has helped improve those skills.

“I think the difference from what I’ve seen, from last year when I taught, and this year when I am using Lingco, is this platform helps with long-term memory,” Brundrett said. “I think that you can definitely see that. Last semester was my first semester using this, and I saw that students were still able to remember (vocabulary) from the beginning of the semester until the end, whereas last year I taught a different level, I didn’t see that too much.”

A future goal for Lingco is to provide instructors with a resource that allows them to focus on teaching.

“Teachers are great at delivering learning content and learning experience for students,” Pope said. “But they have to spend time entering things in the computer and transferring grades from one thing to another. We just want those frustrations of those ongoing tasks to be more automated so teachers can focus on what they’re really good at.”