Juniors Nikhil Rao and Vinay Rao and seniors Akash Abburi and Arnav Gupta are the co-founders of Vertex. As high school students, they discussed their way of managing school and working on the app, in addition to their general vision and how they hope to change studying methods utilized by students.
Nikhil and Vinay Rao focus on the app development and coding areas while Akash Abburi and Arnav Gupta work on the business and marketing aspects of Vertex.
It is a web app dedicated to helping students with academics and finding different ways to study effectively, using tailored questions and combining it with flashcards and AI tutor features. This app is targeted towards high school students and provides a variety of subjects to choose from. In addition, the difficulty of the subject selected can range from regular high school courses to AP courses, increasing its applicability.
“We want students to be united when using the app, and want more resources for [them] to use. Obviously high school is a time of lots of tests and studying, so we wanted to make it more easy for students to do,” Nikhil Rao stated.
To make their vision come to life, he further explains the process of making the app itself and how they built it from scratch with the help of various coding languages and a Gemini AI, which was the main power source for the app.
“We used JavaScript and CSS and Firebase for our database to build the app.” Nikhil Rao further says, “On the back side of things, we have the Node JS server which we learned how to do over the summer.”
Similar to ChatGPT, Gemini is an artificial intelligence model that answers questions and is capable of providing assistance with coding, as demonstrated with Vertex. Nikhil and Vinay Rao have submitted their work to a Gemini app challenge and are waiting for results to come out by the end of 2024.
Nikhil Rao says, “I think there are some really good apps that are submitted, but I think we just are hoping that we get recognition from Google.”
Additionally, they presented their app idea at Menlo Park’s pitch event called “Idea To IPO” where they were given a minute to present their app to a panel of investors along with a general crowd. Soon afterwards, they were given the opportunity to walk around and talk about Vertex to people there and connect with new people.
Vinay Rao explained that “it was pretty good for us because we wanted to get our app publicized and get some attention for it.” He continued, “And, this was a great way to do that, because there were companies looking to buy too.”
As high school juniors, they talked about the way they manage school with developing the app further and continuing to go to such events in the future.
“We like to work on the app over the weekends and during the school week, we usually just spend time on our work.” Nikhil Rao explained.
Additionally, he explains,“Sometimes during access, we bring our phone and computer to start coding the app, or make features for it.” He continues, “So we just try to incorporate it throughout the day, but obviously we prioritize school work first.”
Nikhil and Vinay Rao as well as the other co-founders of Vertex (Akash Abburi and Arnav Gupta) aim to continue helping students and making studying easier for them.
“We just want students to be able to use the rise of technology and AI to help benefit their own lives,” Nikhil Rao concludes.
