C2x

An AI ecosystem with six Gemini agents bridging architects with public & private entities to formulate and deliver housing — carbon-negative, seismic-resistant, locally built.

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Inspiration

One in eight people on Earth lives in a slum — 1 billion, 104 million of them in Latin America (UN-Habitat; TECHO). Building indsutry emits 40% of greenhouse gases and will add a New York City every month through 2060 (UNEP). Our thesis question: where are the carbon-negative materials and the scaling tools that can solve the housing deficit for 1 billion people— without further harming Earth's climate?

In 2021 our team — C2 (C-Squared), a Virginia Tech / Max Planck Institute spin-off — answered with Boohouse and won an XPRIZE Carbon Removal Students Award. Boohouse is a: Lego-like modular house, seismic-resistant, and carbon negative dwelling solution. The raw maerila is bamboo guadua which grows across Quindío, Colombia, with its own chapter in seismic code NSR-10. Deficit and bamboo overlap in the tropics: material for 180 million social houses (INBAR). Seismic resistance was never abstract here — Armenia, Quindío's capital, was destroyed by an earthquake in 1999.

But we hadn't managed to scale it — so far. Quindío has 35,162 households in housing deficit; 8,884 need a new home outright (DANE, 2018 census). Public money goes unspent: projects are never formulated; margins too thin for developers. The bottleneck is capacity. C2X, born at this hackathon, is the vehicle: now AI makes it viable solution at scale. On August 10, 2026 a 7.4 Mw earthquake struck Quindío again (SGC); it did not create our thesis, it stress-tested it.

What it does

C2X is an AI ecosystem bridging independent architects and public & private entities to formulate and deliver housing — modular, carbon-negative, seismic-resistant, locally sourced and built — a vertical integration from AI-assisted formulation to the delivered house. Boohouse is the first system in it; first, not only.

  • Formulation. Six Gemini agents — THOT (context), KAEL (regulation), IRIS (design), CRONOS (budgets), TERRA (logistics), LYRA (documentation) — build the municipal project document in four chapters — problem, housing solution with live coverage, financing with its unlock routes, rules — every norm cited with hierarchy and date.
  • The document is the interface. Every figure carries source, date and confidence; every gap ships with the institution that owns it.
  • The plan lands on real ground. predio.html: satellite polygon, geodesic measurement, capacity solver, six regulatory determinants — including a hard veto on protected land. Built to say no.
  • The house gets designed. iso.html: drag-and-drop modules, the price recomputes against real costs, Gemini renders under a fidelity guardrail.
  • Citizens participate. reporte.html, a damage-reporting PWA moderated by Gemini vision (early prototype).

Every house pays the regional economy — guadua growers, processors, local builders, independent architects. Paying customers are architects and public & private entities. Privately we take the chain end to end. Publicly, C2X formulates and coordinates — it does not award public contracts (Colombia's Law 80) and does not build: construction is executed by the local builder ecosystem. AI executes and produces, the human decides, the architect signs.

How we built it

One founder and fleets of AI agents. Gemini runs the whole reasoning layer in production — context, regulation, financing, design, vision moderation, image generation. Google Cloud provides Firestore, Firebase Auth, Storage and Earth Engine (Open Buildings, Sentinel-2, Copernicus DEM); Stripe, Vercel and Wolfram complete the stack.

One rule shapes everything: models reason and write; they never produce a number. Every figure comes from deterministic tools over sourced datasets as {value, tag, source, vintage}. Illustrative data wears a visible DEMO chip, even inside exports.

The company runs the way the product runs: AI agents write the sprints and execute them end to end — branch, commit per step, QA per step, merge only on green — then report for audit. The suite is 66 harnesses, all green, cross-checking every on-screen figure against its dataset.

Entity and pre-existing work: C2X is operated by C2X SAS (Colombia), wholly-owned subsidiary of C2 TECH LLC — which holds Boohouse and the source code; the platform was built within this hackathon window. Both C2 TECH LLC and C2X SAS are 100% ownded and controlled by the entrant: Esteban Londono.

Challenges we ran into

The bottleneck runs through public institutions, and they move slowly. Housing money passes through a municipality, a departmental government, an environmental authority and a ministry; land-use instruments are two decades old. Only a fully formulated project moves through that machinery.

Deciding what not to claim. A confident wrong number is worse than a visible gap, so anti-hallucination became an interface — provenance chips, source modals, gaps with owners — not a disclaimer. Statutes, non-binding opinions and binding determinants are labelled for their legal force — whoever signs must know which obliges.

The week the earthquake took. It struck seven days before this deadline, mid go-to-market: a week of intermittent power, no running water. The contractor running our marketing lost their house; the campaign drifted, unmanned. Selling became one-to-one, in a region in emergency mode. Our August 13 meeting with the Governor was cancelled. We report what that week produced exactly as it is. We adaptaed in less than a week to respond to this challenge. Here are we are shipping this submission, to be able to leverage C2X as a trasnformative tool in Colombia and later to other regions around the world.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Production, not a prototype: real authentication with data-protection consent, 12 municipalities on real data, 66/66 green test suite, plans live on Stripe since July 29, and a walkthrough judges can open without registering or paying.

First commercial traction: a signed MOU with Kubiko Design — one of our current paying customers — covering private housing, public housing and rural schools (Armenia, August 16, 2026); and preliminary communications with the Gobernación del Quindío toward departmental adoption — interrupted by the earthquake.

TWO SPECIFIC TWO MILESTONES:

1) PROOF OF MOU WITH KUBIKO DESIGN:' https://drive.google.com/file/d/1w5kv2SX1_1UHN0-oY1gI_wJdNYKGS5EQ/view?usp=sharing

2) PROOF OF ONGOING CONVERSATIONS WITH GOBERNACIÓN DEL QUINDIO: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yveEFxg31WR_xrtCaSSB7_xE-67LqMLG/view?usp=sharing

What we learned

The binding constraint is not money — it is formulation capacity. AI's contribution is not speed but legibility and traceability: a document a public entity can defend line by line. Constraint is the product: the moment the system refused a protected plot was the moment it became trustworthy.

What's next for C2X

Close the post-earthquake damage-assessment gap with its owner institutions; extend from Pijao to the rest of Quindío; open the ecosystem to other building systems that meet the same four principles; grow the guadua supply chain. Destination: the tropical belt — back to the billion this story opened with. Then push AI into manufacturing and on-site deployment, where the real cost of a home is decided.

C2X SAS · Quindío, Colombia

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