Auburn Engineering alumni on Forbes 30 Under 30 for new companies

Convenience is big business for Daniel Mazur and Mit Patel.

The pair of Auburn Engineering graduates run SwiftSku, an all-in-one sales tech solution for independent convenience stores and gas stations in the United States.

Starting the company as Auburn students set them up for a fast launch. As students, they gained confidence with early wins through business competitions on and off campus, from Tiger Cage to the Rice University Business Plan Competition.

But they didn’t just gain confidence: The pair secured hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding before Mazur, ’21 mechanical engineering, and Patel, ’21 mechanical engineering, had even walked across the graduation stage.

By the end of 2021, they had raised more than $3 million for the company.

In 2026, they can hang their hats on a new recognition: appearing on Forbes 30 Under 30 rankings for retail and ecommerce companies. The rankings honor individuals and companies who are “reinventing how we shop, on and offline,” according to Forbes.

SwiftSku works with independent store owners to help them leverage technology to better compete against larger convenience chains. The company works with those stores to adopt the latest in inventory and sales management software and technology, allowing independent owners to cut waste and stay efficient in a competitive market.

And identifying that need is paying off for Patel and Mazur.

Today, SwiftSku employs 35 people working with more than 3,000 convenience stores in almost every state in the U.S. The Forbes recognition comes just as business is dramatically changing for the company, as Mazur noted the majority of those 3,000 clients have joined the company in the past two years.

“It’s got to come back to the team, at the end of the day. Without having the right people as part of this journey, none of this would be possible,” Mazur said. “First and foremost is my co-founder, (Mit). He grew up in the space. He worked the long hours with his family’s convenience stores. He did the hard things growing up.”

Convenience stores are often a major steppingstone for first-generation Americans and immigrant families working toward a better life in the country.

It’s a background intimately familiar to the founders, who are both sons of first-generation American families.

“That really resonates — it’s really important to us that we’re helping these communities take their first steps,” Mazur said. “My family came as Jewish refugees just a few years before I was born. The community in Alabama took us in, and this is one way that I view us as giving back to immigrants of all kinds.”

Growing up in Hoover, they’ve known each other since they were 10 years old and always had an entrepreneurial bent to their friendship — selling extra school supplies and other odds and ends to classmates and starting e-commerce stores in their free time.

That spirit found a great home at Auburn University, where Mazur and Patel were able to not just get an education, but experiment with new ideas in environment that encouraged learning from failures.

“We won Tiger Cage in April 2020. That was really big. That gave us the validation,” Mazur said. “At the end of the day, it all came down to getting that initial traction.”

The competition “taught us how to pitch,” he added. “We spent hundreds of hours perfecting that first pitch deck. That helped us to learn how to talk about the story, the narrative. That was really important.

"It got us our first reps in, right? I was on my first podcast, the #GINNing podcast. I had our first press through the engineering marketing department at Auburn. We had a lot of firsts, where we got to practice in a friendly environment. We got a chance to practice in an environment where it was acceptable to fail."

Mazur is looking forward to SwiftSku rolling out major new services in the coming year, and says the company has reached a hinge point after more than six years.

“It feels like things are really coming together — like we’re a rocket ship that’s just taken off,” Mazur said.