Asah

An AI startup mentor that validates ideas, analyzes business performance, reviews contracts, and guides founders step-by-step from concept to launch using Amazon Nova.

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Inspiration

According to 2025 data, 1.31 million startups are operating in the US. However, the failure crisis is staggering. 10% of startups fail in their first year, and 70% fail between years two and five.

Founders frequently misread market demand, which accounts for 42% of all startup failures. Developing unvalidated products costs founders an average of $50,000 or more in wasted resources.

The second root cause involves information asymmetry in venture capital deals. Legal teams spend an average of 3.2 hours reviewing a single term sheet. Processing 500 contracts requires 200 working days of labor. When founders outsource contract review to law firms, the costs run into $5,000 to $10,000 or more. This financial burden forces founders to either sign agreements they do not fully understand, leaving them in a precarious position, or spend an enormous amount of time reviewing contracts themselves.

What it does

  • Business Idea Validation Users input their business idea, and Amazon Nova analyzes it to evaluate strengths, weaknesses, market risks, and opportunities. The system generates structured feedback to help founders determine if the idea is viable.

  • Startup Roadmap Guidance Amazon Nova generates a custom startup roadmap based on the user's business stage. The AI recommends actionable next steps such as validating the market, building an MVP, registering the business, or preparing for launch.

  • Document Risk Detection Entrepreneurs can upload contracts or business documents. Amazon Nova analyzes the documents to summarize key sections, identify risky clauses, highlight important legal terms, and answer user questions about the document.

  • AI Mentor Chat The platform includes an AI mentor chat powered by Amazon Nova. Founders can ask questions about business strategy, startup operations, legal considerations, product development, and scaling. Amazon Nova provides contextual responses based on the user's startup stage and previously provided information.

How we built it

  • Frontend: React-based single-page application built with TypeScript, designed in Figma and developed to deliver an intuitive user interface for question input and AI response rendering.
  • Backend: Python application powered by Amazon Nova through AWS Bedrock, processing user inputs and generating AI-driven responses for startup mentorship, idea validation, document analysis, and strategic guidance.

Challenges we ran into

  • Limited development experience: As UX design students without backend expertise, we had to implement Amazon Nova integration ourselves, which took significantly longer than expected.
  • Team coordination: Managing three different design visions while integrating Amazon Nova's capabilities across multiple features consumed more time than anticipated.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As a UX design team, we focused on frontend development and had no prior experience with backend implementation. We're proud to have built a fully functional backend for this project and integrated it with Amazon Nova to power the platform's AI capabilities.

What we learned

We leveraged AWS and AI tools to accelerate development and solve technical challenges more efficiently. This experience demonstrated how cloud infrastructure combined with AI can enhance productivity and enable teams to deliver comprehensive solutions.

What's next for Asah

  • Collect feedback through user testing to refine the platform based on real founder experiences.
  • Launch the platform to make AI-powered startup mentorship accessible to entrepreneurs in the US.
  • Support different languages to serve founders across diverse markets and regions.

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