Pranjali Awasthi, a young AI entrepreneur, is no unknown name in the world of startups. At just the age of 16, she became one of the youngest persons to launch her AI startup Delv.Ai, a copilot for research and information extraction.
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Awasthi, now 19, received recognition in the industry for gaining an early interest in coding at the age of just 7. Inspired by her engineer father, her early exposure into this field ignited a passion for technology that shaped her future.
Her family moved to the United States from India when she was 11. In Florida, she began taking computer science classes and did competitive math. By the age of 13, Awasti was doing an internship at the Florida International University.
Then in 2022, at the age of 16, she founded Delv.AI, an AI-powered platform designed to streamline data extraction for researchers.
In an interview with Business Insider in 2023, Awasthi revealed how she got the idea for her company. At 13, she was able to begin interning for the university research labs at Florida International University due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Classes had gone virtual, which gave her more free time to intern for about 20 hours a week.
“My tasks included doing searches, extracting data, and creating literature reviews. In 2020, OpenAI released its ChatGPT-3 beta, and I knew we could use it to make extracting and summarizing research data easier,” she said.
Awasthi further noted: “As a research intern, I was hyper-aware of how hard it was to find exactly what you needed on search engines. I began thinking about how AI could solve this problem. That was the seed for my company, Delv.AI.”
In 2021, she was able to get an entry into a startup accelerator 12-week cohort during her visit to Miami Hack Week.
“I went to Miami Hack Week where I met Lucy Guo and Dave Fontenot, partners at Backend Capital. They also founded HF0 residency, a live-in startup accelerator in San Francisco and Miami. I was accepted into their September 12-week cohort in exchange for a small piece of my future company. My parents told me I should take the opportunity, the network alone would be worth it, so I took an absence from high school,” she said.
The program paid for her expenses such as commute, helping her eventually launch the beta version of Delv.AI on Product Hunt, a platform for people to share software for free. The launch coincided with her 15th birthday and by 2022 she was able to hire the first engineer and work on a minimum viable product.
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During the fellowship, she built a strong network in the AI community and subsequently raised $4,50,000 funds for her company. At the time of the interview, she revealed that her company was valued at around $12 million (over Rs 100 crore).
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