Two Tar Heels Earn Forbes 30 Under 30 Nods

This story was originally written and published by the Carolina Alumni Review. (Photo: Forbes)

Two Carolina graduates — including UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media alumna Anne Marie Hagerty ’18 — were named to the 2026 Forbes 30 Under 30 List earlier this month.

The Forbes list recognizes the most influential young people in various industries, including media and technology.

Anne Marie Hagerty

Hagerty is the founder and CEO of Alo Media, the company behind The Envoy on Amazon Prime Video, a docuseries hosted by Hagerty that explores food around the world. She was named to the 30 Under 30 in Media list.

The Envoy is not a decorative, indulgent travel series with postcard scenery. It’s more of a business program disguised as a culinary show. “Food diplomacy,” Hagerty calls it, hence the title of the show.

In each episode, Hagerty and the Emmy- and Academy Award-winning members of her crew travel to new pockets of the globe, uncovering how food is transforming economies and ecosystems. The first episode examines fonio, an ancient grain West Africans are using to create jobs and replenish farmland in Senegal. Hagerty said, “If we can make more of the ‘vegetables’ of different topics compelling and seem a little bit like ‘candy,’ then in the long term, we’re serving people better.”

She was inspired to leave a job in venture capital marketing due to the power of an international marketing story: Thailand in the early 2000s spent millions of dollars combatting its reputation for sex tourism by sending Thai chefs around the world to open restaurants. The campaign more than tripled the number of Thai restaurants globally and led to trillions of baht in tourism revenue. Hagerty said, “My question was ‘Okay, if it worked in Thailand, where else could it work?’ ”

She started pitching her idea to governments across the globe and made enough money from contracts with them to fund the first few episodes. With The Envoy, she hopes to tell engaging culinary stories that viewers can’t Google. It’s a hustle similar to projects she pursued in a UNC international video journalism class, during which in 2016 she traveled to Panama. And her current subject matter is reminiscent of “Eats 101,” Carolina’s “Honors Seminar in Food and Culture,” which Hagerty guest lectured in November.

Her approach combines four media themes she delved into as a student in the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media: news, marketing, visual documentary making and social media. She’s simultaneously reporting untold stories, helping countries market their food economies, producing a show on a major streaming platform and showing a social media audience authentic scenes from her work. The first episode features a clip of Hagerty applying her makeup and joking with the crew in the back of a van.

The result is a media product that doesn’t fit into a mold, not to mention it’s one of the few travel shows ever hosted by a woman. A former Miss North Carolina first runner-up, Hagerty said she appreciates the Forbes recognition on a personal level, but she’s most excited about the visibility it brings to the show.

“It helps us grow,” she said. “It’s a stamp of validation like, ‘You’re doing something that is truly not being done in this space.’ ”

Sheel Patel

Sheel Patel might be the only chief technology officer in Manhattan who delivers meals for DoorDash in his free time.

He’s been doing it since he was a student at Carolina, and at this point, it’s more research than anything else.

Alongside Shashwat Murarka, Patel is the co-founder of Doorstep, a company that provides precise indoor and outdoor tracking for last-mile delivery services. He was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 in Transportation and Aerospace list.

Doorstep integrates into existing delivery apps and tracks a driver’s movements inside a building through staircases, turns and even elevators. The technology makes it easier for drivers to find the right doorstep, especially in winding apartment buildings.

“[We] developed an algorithm so we can understand, with a phone, the orientation of that device and where it is pointing,” Patel said. “We can now understand exactly where in a building a phone is traveling, so we can understand where something’s being dropped off.”

The technology can be used to prevent missing meals and automate dispute resolution, validating deliveries through geospatial tracking rather than through proof-of-delivery photos, which Patel said are sometimes a picture of a delivery person’s thumb. Murkara told TechCrunch, “For me, this isn’t just about stopping fraud or refunds. It’s about rebuilding trust between platforms and customers and between drivers and the work they do.”

The company announced in September it raised $8 million in seed funding led by Canaan Partners to scale the technology.

But before Patel was leading a muti-million-dollar tech firm, he was a student at Carolina, where he majored in computer science and minored in public policy and data science.

Doorstep isn’t his first startup. His sophomore year he co-founded Carolina Cupid, which eventually became Whirl — Want to Hang In Real Life. — It provided matchmaking services exclusive to students at a dozen colleges on the east coast.

Patel built the algorithm that matched couples based on user-submitted interest forms. After his junior year, he met Murkara through mutual colleagues in Atlanta. Murkara had completed an internship in New York and ordered the same dish from DoorDash repeatedly. Each time, a different driver asked the same question: “How do I get to your apartment?”

Patel understood the other side of the problem: he had been a DoorDasher in Chapel Hill. “A lot of times, we’re not given a lot of information when it comes to how a customer wants their delivery experience. We just get an address with a pin on the map that’s usually in the center of a big apartment building,” he said. “We don’t know where the hell that is.”

The two entrepreneurs started toying with solutions. Patel created a site to allow users to share photos and directions that would automatically be deleted after a certain interval. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but the two gained enough traction to get the market’s attention.

Patel applied what he was learning in an augmented reality class with Professor Richard Marks in the School of Data Science and Society during the fall semester of his senior year in 2023. He built a wayfinding technology for his final project, and it would form the foundation for Doorstep’s technology. As a senior, Patel began pitching the product to major retailers.

Doorstep partners with delivery companies across the country and embeds its software development kit into existing mobile apps.

As of five years ago, Patel said apps could give exact guidance about which traffic lane a driver was supposed to be. “Now,” he said, “we can have that level of guidance indoors. [Our software] was the first showcase of that.”