PĒRL | Devpost

Inspiration

A $2,700 wisdom tooth surgery in March sparked my initial investigation into dental care. I surveyed my network about their dental habits and worked a two-day shift at Bracesaurus at TripleOne Somerset to understand clinic operations firsthand. I followed up with extensive market research through Google Forms and constant community outreach.

The turning point was volunteering at Project Chulia Street and Westlite Ubi. Translating forms into Bengali and Hindi to understand the healthcare struggles of migrant workers fundamentally shifted our mission. Our ideal customer profile rapidly evolved from students and young professionals to include migrant workers and the elderly. We recognized the healthcare system was inaccessible, expensive, fragmented, and severely outdated.

What it does

PĒRL is the definitive operating layer for preventive care. We are building a dynamic three-sided marketplace that connects patients, clinics, and vetted locum talent.

By orchestrating these three pillars, we help clinics unlock hidden capacity and streamline their operations. This makes preventive care vastly more accessible, seamless, and affordable for all demographics, spanning from young professionals to underserved migrant workers.

How we built it

Brandon, works a demanding 9-5 at A*STAR so the development cycle were starting from Brandon balanced a demanding full-time role at A*STAR, focusing our development cycles between 9 PM and midnight. During the day, I leveraged Google AI Studio and Claude to prototype and build around our API limitations (somehow the OpenAI credits did not pull through)

Challenges we ran into

As a first-time hackathon participant, I faced a steep learning curve: The API Blockades: We hit massive roadblocks trying to secure OpenAI credits and ElevenLabs tokens. This stalled our early progress. Deciding between a Telegram bot or a chatbot within the website

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Pivoting fast: When we lost access to OpenAI, we seamlessly pivoted our entire stack to utilize Google AI Studio. Brandon drove the manual backend development on GitHub to keep the project moving forward.

Deep Customer Discovery: We translated materials into multiple languages and spoke directly to real users, founders, and investors to validate our assumptions.

Shipping the Product: Despite having a zero-dollar budget, API limitations, and no prior hackathon experience, we successfully launched our MVP - shareable link

What we learned

When standard APIs block you, you find alternative architectures. Most importantly, we learned that true product-market fit comes from empathy. You cannot build a healthcare platform without looking your underserved users in the eye and listening to their specific bottlenecks.

What's next for PĒRL

Aggressively scaling our three-sided marketplace. We plan to onboard our first cohort of private practices, deploy our dynamic supply injection to fill their empty chairs, and integrate our first wave of vetted locum talent. We are turning PĒRL into the foundational infrastructure for modern, accessible clinical care.