Kairos

Inspiration Student founders miss non-dilutive funding because opportunities are scattered, eligibility is unclear, and applications compete with classes and building their company. Kairos is named for the fleeting “right moment”—the funding window you can catch only if someone is watching. What it does Kairos continuously finds funding opportunities, filters them against a founder’s profile, ranks the worthwhile ones, and drafts grounded application responses. It asks the founder only for facts it genuinely lacks, while keeping them in control of approval and submission. How we built it We built a FastAPI backend with SQLite persistence and a Next.js dashboard. An agent pipeline discovers opportunities from curated catalogs, Grants.gov, and reviewed campus sources; then separate Assessor, Drafter, and Auditor agents evaluate fit, prepare drafts, and check claims. Deterministic Python guardrails handle eligibility, budgets, authorization, and final safety checks. Challenges we ran into The hardest problem was not finding opportunities—it was avoiding confident but harmful errors. Funding pages are inconsistent, forms are incomplete, deadlines change, and an invented metric in an application can hurt a founder. We also had to defend against prompt injection in scraped content and ensure runs, notifications, and spending limits remain reliable. Accomplishments that we're proud of

Built an end-to-end agent loop that works while the founder is away.
Created a fail-closed drafting gate: unsupported claims, protected disclosures, invented numbers, and missing provenance block a draft.
Achieved 85.7% recall on a hand-built discovery benchmark, with 100% precision on verified eligibility coverage.
Curated 59 opportunities, with 52 verified directly against source pages.
Added durable jobs, idempotency, per-founder authorization, and a dashboard that explains why opportunities were surfaced or skipped. What we learned The best use of AI here is judgment and language—not final authority. Models can interpret messy information, but eligibility, money, deadlines, access control, and safety must be enforced deterministically. We also learned that abstaining and asking a targeted question is far more valuable than generating a polished guess. What's next for Kairos Next, we’ll validate the live model path, expand verified campus and national funding sources, connect the conversational intake flow to the dashboard, and test the product with real student founders. We also plan to improve personalized matching, deadline monitoring, and collaborative review workflows—while keeping Kairos firmly in the “prepare and assist” role, never submitting on a founder’s behalf.