2010: a Class Project at EPFL
Back in 2010, in a Software Development course taught by Prof. George Candea at EPFL, a group of 20 students were given a unique challenge. Unlike typical courses where small groups worked on separate assignments, the entire class joined forces to build one single, unified project. Nowadays, the course is called Software Entreprise and welcomed 200 students in 2025!
Starting With Student Interviews
To figure out what to build, we started by interviewing our fellow students across campus: What would actually make your daily life at EPFL easier?
The feedback made it obvious: students needed a central mobile app to navigate everyday campus routines. Remember, this was 2010, the early days of smartphones, so taking a user-research approach to build a campus app was completely novel.
Building it Like a Software Company
To build it, the class was organized into subteams with designated responsibilities, much like a real software company. We worked in weekly sprints, putting into practice the Agile methodologies that would become the industry norm.
The First Campus App Features
We focused on a core set of essentials:
Course schedule
Daily cafeteria menus
Interactive campus map
Metro schedule (at the time, the official public transport apps were quite poor, so this one really mattered)
From Live Demo to Android, iOS and Web
In December 2010, at the end of the semester, we presented a live demo of our working prototype in front of stakeholders from EPFL and industry leaders.
The response was overwhelming, and a core group of us couldn't let it go. We continued building through subsequent semester projects, launching our first public Android release in Fall 2011. So that iPhone users weren't left out, our co-founder Loïc Gardiol spent most of the spring and summer of 2012 developing the iOS version from scratch, launching in Fall 2012. A couple of years later, we introduced a desktop web version to serve students right from their laptops.
2013: The Official EPFL Campus App
In 2013, long before university IT departments had mobile apps on their radar, EPFL took a bold step: they trusted our student-led project and made PocketCampus the official EPFL campus app.
2016: From Student Project to Swiss Startup
By 2016, Loïc Gardiol and Amer Chamseddine co-founded PocketCampus as a Swiss startup to bring this experience to other universities and corporate hubs. Over the years, driven by what users and customers asked for and by our own ideas, those first features grew into much more:
Course materials (Moodle integration) & grades
Room bookings & live room occupancy tracking
Digital student/employee IDs, business cards & integrated e-wallets
News, events & real-time messaging with push notifications
Behind all of this are many technical integrations with existing legacy systems, and partnerships we’ve built across the sector.
PocketCampus Today
Fast forward to today:
Market leader in Switzerland for all-in-one campus apps, with a growing presence in France
33 institutions served & 130,000+ monthly active users
100% self-funded from day one, a milestone we are incredibly proud of
A dedicated team of 9 employees
It all started with 20 students collaborating on a single class assignment using weekly Agile sprints. Never underestimate where a university course project can lead.
