Athena.vc finds strong technical founders and works with them intensely for 6 months on ideating and validating $100bn+ markets. By studying 100s of companies, talking to 100s of users, industry experts, and ex-founders. Validating via driving ad traffic, sign ups, closing LOIs, making MVPs. Navigating the idea maze to build a 10x better solution.
Tania was a technical fellow at Google and also worked with ContactOut, where she was one of our strongest technical product managers.
Tania is building a search engine for scientific research, a better version of Google Scholar. Tania has spoken with the ex managing director of Nature.com India, as well as 30+ PhDs, including MIT, Harvard, Stanford, DeepMind, and ambushing professors at NUS, IIT. Perplexity built a 51million ARR search business as a ChatGPT and Google wrapper. We want to do the same for Google scholar. Scholar sucks, you can’t even see the contents of the articles. Once we’re the dominant science search engine, the goal is to be an open platform for publishing and funding. Kickstarter for science and take 1%-3% of the trillions of research dollars. Publishing is broken, review takes 6 months, our best science is behind paywalls. h-index sucks at predicting impact. Funding is even more broken, 90% is wasted.
Nadin Susanto and Nico Christian Athena application
Nadine advised a 3 star general on cyber security in Indonesia. Nico is ex-Tokopedia and previously built Fasih and Deaf to Dev helping deaf people find jobs. Previously they worked on NookApp, a platform for finding roommates. They learn fast and read 20+ books per year.
Nadine and Nico are researching fixing cold storage supply chain in Indonesia. Food poisoning is so common in Indonesia that there’s a word for it: Bali Belly. Cold supply chain touches 15% of Indonesia’s GDP - 10% of which is logistics costs. It is seriously broken. One of the main problems is power supply for freezers. Diesel is expensive. By converting to electric and advanced batteries 50% of the cost could be saved.
Himanshu Daga Athena application
Himanshu was Google’s AI facilitator where he taught 1,000+ students. He was the youngest Antler India resident. Previously he built Jar4u an AI that generates 3D experience from 2D images for jewelry, and was an AI research engineer at avataar.me contributing to the company's $250million valuation.
Himanshu is exploring real estate and how to increase India’s mortgage penetration from 12% to 50%. Help low income earners buy a house with multi-family mortgage applications and fractional property ownership. He is also studying peer to peer loans, e.g Meesho for loans and Grameen bank models.
Vishal Anand Athena application
Vishal is a laparoscopic surgeon at India's top medical institute AIIMS and a second time founder.
He is working on telehealth for rural patients. 57% of rural doctors in India lack a medical qualification leading to misdiagnosis and improper treatment. Vishal realized the need for a hybrid online, offline approach that partners with village doctors. He is currently exploring a medical LLM and human doctor hybrid service, training programs for rural doctors and drug delivery. Vishal's research.
Kaushik Varanasi Athena application
Kaushik is an open source engineer who worked at HackerRank and Zomato. He has previously collaborated with the developer of MySQL and SQLite and placed within top 10% of YC applications.
Kaushik is working on an open source backend server called RocketGraph.io. He has some traction on hacker news and product hunt
Bryce Altman Athena Application
Bryce is a second time founder. His last startup raised 3.2m from Neo.com and Blackbird.vc. He also was the number one ranked Taekwondo fighter in Australia for his division.
Bryce is building Google for podcasts. A 10x better podcast player and audio search engine. Bryce has a handful of users using his MVP product regularly. He’s interviewed lots of users and studied lots of competitors. Podcast search is broken, you can't search contents of an episode, or find stuff without knowing the episode name. Features Bryce is researching: making podcast transcripts searchable, 1 minute AI episode summaries, skip to a section by clicking the transcript.
Note: Business ideas may change by the end of the program as founders learn and pivot.