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When Kudus Pativada was 14, he wished he had an app that summarized his books. Just five years later, Pativada has gone there and done just that – earlier this year, it launched Cadon, an AI-based app that turns photos, documents or PDFs into flashcards. Now, the 19-year-old founder is looking to take his company DigestAI beyond flashcards to create the AI conversational assistant we all carry on our phones, as the 19-year-old founder takes the stage for Startup Battlefield.
“If we make learning really easy and accessible, it’s something you can do as soon as you open your phone,” Pativada told TechCrunch. “We want to put a teacher in every person’s phone for every topic in the world.”
Kudus Pativada, Founder at DigestAI pitches as TechCrunch Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco on October 18, 2022. Image credit: Haje Kamps / TechCrunch
The company’s AI is trained with data from the internet, but the algorithm is fine-tuned to ensure its responses are accurate and not too thrown off by online chaos.
“We train on everything, but the actual use cases are in silos. It’s what we call ‘federated learning,’ where it’s not siled and the language models are working on the use case,” Pativada said. “This is good because it prevents malicious use.”
Pativada says this type of product will be different from smart assistants like Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa because the information provided will be more personalized and detailed. Therefore, for specific use cases, such as querying sources for use in an essay, AI will be extracted from academic journals to ensure that the information is accurate and appropriate for the class.
Although he runs an educational AI startup, Pativada is not currently in school. He took a year off before going to college to work on the startup, but once DigestAI started, he decided to continue building it instead of going back to school. Growing up, he taught himself to code because he loved video games, so he wanted to make his own – at the age of 10, he published a clone of “Flappy Bird” on the App Store. Naturally, his technological ambitions have grown stronger over time. Prior to co-founding DigestAI, Pativada built a Covid-19 contact tracing platform. He initially developed the app as a tool for his classmates – but the work ended up being sponsored by the UAE government.
Image Credits: Digest AI
The outlook so far is good for the Dubai-based company. Pativada — who says he feels a bit uneasy about the CEO tag and prefers to think of himself as a founder — has raised $600,000 so far from angel investors like Mark Cuban and Shan Patel. , event specialist.
How does a 19-year-old in Dubai attract the attention of the most famous of you startup investors? Cold email. Mark, we apologize if this entry made your inbox even more of a nightmare.
“I was watching a GQ video of Mark Cuban’s routine. “He said he reads his emails every morning at 9 AM, and I looked at his watch in Dallas, and it was 9 AM. So I was like, maybe I should shoot him an email and see what happens. When he was there, he went to Patel, whose education startup did over $20 million in sales. It arrived. Patel got on a video call with the fledgling founder, and the next week he and Kuba both offered to invest in DigestAI.
“We raised our entire round with cold emails and amplification,” Pativada told TechCrunch. “It helped me a lot because no one could see how young I looked in person.”
Before deciding to leave college entirely, Pativada applied to Stanford and interviewed with alumni. He didn’t get into the rival Palo Alto University, but the interviewer, at Stanford, eventually invested in the company. Go figure.
“Our goal is to work with universities like Stanford,” Pativada said. The company targets enterprise customers. Currently, DigestAI works with some American universities, Italy’s Bocconi University, a European law firm and other clients. Law firm DigestAI is testing a tool that allows associates to send a WhatsApp number to quickly check on legal terms.
In the long term, DigestAI wants to create an SMS system where people can text the AI asking for help learning something — the information it wants to be accessible is “addictive.”
“That’s what AI is – it’s almost the best version of humans,” Pativada said.
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