It was a great learning experience last weekend at the AI Venture-Building Hackathon organized by Hatch Labs hosted at Rise, created by Barclays & Microsoft. Thank you Nick Petkoff & Yasmeen Collins for being such wonderful moderator & putting this together.
The panelists were a spectacular batch and Nihal Mehta of Eniac Ventures even popped in to share with us on what he believes will make a founder successful — and that is, to never give up!
The goal was to ideate, implement, and pitch an #AIAgent that will solve a pain point in a chosen field. I teamed up with Zoe (clinical data research) & Lobsang Gyatso (studied philosophy in India) to build #Energeez — an AI companion app using ancient insights & AI precision to decode energy.
Super grateful that mentors like Danny Bloomstine, Brian Yarnell, and Alex Yen sat down with us to listen & provide their perspectives on the feasibility of bootstrapping this!
Danny Bloomstine, expert of GTM strategies, pointed out the viral potential of eastern“mysteriousness” to western markets for something that’s already popular & sophisticated locally.
Brian Yarnell went over the types of business models possible for us— like referral links to e-commerce/pharmacies — and to target users like intellectually curious individuals seeking alternative therapies for mental health conditions or personal growth (touched on #psychedelic products/services).
Alex Yen emphasized to us the importance of #fundraising at inflection points & to close rounds in a reasonable timeframe. He offered his help to advise on #investor relationship management & how to cold-email the right VC in the respected sector.
We reached out to #CPC mentors Shirley Han & Warren Zhou at IBM to conjure up a technical specification for building a mvp and consulted Jerry Ji, a #Meta #GenAI engineer building Capybara.AI with exceptional product velocity— on technical difficulties like handling noisy data in ML & data privacy issues. It was also brought to my attention the cost & time of accessing clinical data from a project that Jacob Ioffe from another team was working on.
Special thanks to: Manan Upadhyay, Parker Odrich, Daniel Nelson, Richard Cuellar-Lopez, Jay Sehgal, Benoy Thanjan, Erin Rose, Maria K., Natan Vidra, Varun Mehta, Dmitry Koltunov, Naomi Goez, Erica V., Roy Ben-Alta, and Arjun
About Energeez:
“Ancient Insight, AI Precision — Decode your energy”
Energeez taps into ancient medical philosophies to look for physical indicators of emotions and to provide insights on how to optimize your stamina. Users can scan their face, tongue & palm to discover color patterns that will indicate a potential endocrine imbalance.
The core idea was to provide AI companionship through understanding user emotions & validating their feelings with additional psychological tools like personality tests, dream interpretations, and various cultural astrology systems (which shared common roots in ancient philosophies that influenced each other).