Raksha

Inspiration

The Raksha team aspires to create something that can impact the industry of infrastructure on a global scale. Inspired by developers in our community and hardware products such as the Moen Flo, Raksha understands how real estate developers could benefit from a tool which protects their buildings, their tenants, and their energy. Raksha's end goal is to provide structural support for underdeveloped family homes and areas that don't have the adequate resources to uphold safety standards, holding property managers accountable and prioritizing the safety of residents.

What it does

Raksha is preventative monitoring service for developers, contractors, and property managers. Sensors are placed throughout a building and feed a single, unique, dashboard that flags structural and mechanical problems (cracks, leaks, overheating pipes) before they become dangerous or expensive failures.

How we built it

Using Claude Design, Replit, and Figma, we designed the products look, prioritizing reduced cognitive overload, simplicity, and urgency.

For the model we used a custom ResNet-18 neural network on real world data (Kaggle, MaFuDa, University of Ottawa) to train the model to detect faults early on, the IDE used was VSCODE with Claude Code as our choice of coding agent, an api was also used to generate reports on the issues.

Challenges we ran into

Many of our initial ideas were breaking into overly saturated or generally unfeasible markets which we only realized as a team once a day of research occurred, leading to multiple pivots. We needed to rebuild our software, throw the idea for our physical prototype, and spend hours amending the data and time that was wasted.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We pivoted. As a team our morale remained high and we were able to rethink out a new approach. We created a software which was validated through interviews with two major developers in Los Angeles and Texas, and calculated a hole in the market which showed us real opportunity.

What we learned

There are a few companies who are dominating the market, but their products are very expensive and are only used by the biggest developments in the world. Most infrastructural sustainability companies using tech functions as SaaS, we understood this is our best approach, but also what would differentiate us: Offering guaranteed warranties, covering hardware and labor costs, breaking even with returned consumption (we have faith in our product) as the tech is inexpensive yet accurate.

What's next for Raksha

Next, Raksha plans to pilot with a real property. Having real connections and partnerships with developers in the Los Angeles area, we hope to install sensors in a love building and measure prevented failures against a baseline. We want to move from threshold-based alerts to models that predict failures from historical sensor data, and integrate a real team of technicians we can dispatch to automate escalation calls and texts, and fix insecurities when initially found. We hope to eventually work officials within our cities, and hope to regulate Raksha monitorization across family homes in order to clean the legal landscape which has grown murky in real estate, preventing vexatious litigation from continuing in the realm: tenants will be protected as well developers. Eventually, we want to bring Raksha to neighborhoods which lack safety resources, in order to make a change using recent technological advances, which is the reason we first began this project.