Stanford Students Pitch Us Their Startups | $3500 Prize Money (#449)

Tom pitched a lightweight AR add-on that attaches to existing glasses and displays live subtitles in the wearer’s field of view using third-party automated speech recognition services (Google, Microsoft, IBM), with plans to move toward on-device models.

Shaan argued that the hardware/form-factor race is dominated by major companies and that captions could become a feature layered on top of mass-market AR glasses, making the startup’s current approach less investable in his view.

Soham said AdmitYogi sells access to a database of accepted college applications; high schoolers pay $5–$10 per application, while the company pays college students to upload, including via a Common App integration that takes ~30 seconds.

Soham reported the business started in September 2022 with no outside funding, expects $130,000 in revenue in its first year (Sept 2022–Aug 2023), and said it has helped over 11,000 high schoolers; he also cited a TikTok channel with 61,000 followers and 30 million organic impressions as a key distribution engine.

Zain and Matthew described Candid as a vlog-based journaling product that prompts daily highs/lows and reflective questions, then transcribes videos and extracts emotions/topics to show patterns, enable “smart search,” and generate a weekly “aura” visual; they said they have ~50 users, are in TestFlight, raised a $500k pre-seed, and plan campus-to-campus launches starting at Stanford.