Motor City Foundry (MCF)

Inspiration: The project stems from the city of Detroit and how founders here as well as stakeholders are always having conversations on how founders struggle to get the right support day one, how there is a lack of capital here in Detroit, in Michigan and the Midwest. Meanwhile, Detroit is a thriving startup ecosystem filled with a multitude of talent, energy and grit.

What it does: Motor City Foundry (MCF)

Motor City Foundry is an AI-powered Founder Operating System (FOS) that helps startups become investment-ready while creating unprecedented transparency between founders and investors. Powered by Boardy AI, MCF replaces traditional accelerator programs and static CRMs with an adaptive execution platform that continuously measures progress across product development, market validation, team capability, financial readiness, and operational execution. The platform introduces a Dual-Readiness State Machine, where founders receive a Startup Readiness Score while investors receive an Investor Readiness Score based on objective behavioral signals such as capital deployment velocity, commitment rates, liquidity, and decision transparency. This two-sided scoring system creates milestone-gated Dynamic Deal Rooms where both parties are mutually qualified before engagement, eliminating wasted time, improving trust, and dramatically increasing fundraising efficiency. By combining AI coaching, guided execution, investor transparency, and structured deal intelligence, MCF transforms fundraising from a relationship-driven process into a measurable operating system for venture readiness.

How we built it: Built with Google AI Labs, NotebookLM and Gemini. Backed by Vercel and Firebase. Assisted by Boardy AI, built with Gemini, Google AI Labs, Google Cloud, Gemma and Hermes with the assist of RajaAI.

Challenges we ran into: System updates to include the Hermes Agentic Agent integration prior to submission.

Accomplishments that we're proud of: Founder built an agentic agent and trained the agent on MCF, entire build out and design was a team effort based on the founders vision.

What we learned: A great deal about the Google AI Studio and Cloud ecosystem and how agents roles can evolve and improve a founders journey with human oversight.

What's next for Motor City Foundry (MCF): Our plan post hack is to apply for two additional Google startup programs and two founders challenges here locally in the Michigan startup ecosystem. We would also look for local buy in from VC's here and community based funds.

Built With

• boardy
• gemini
• gemma
• google
• hermes
• notebooklm
• openai
• rajaai