This profile is part of the Sacramento Business Journal's Inno Under 25 feature.
Sacramento Inno Under 25 recognizes entrepreneurs, innovators, founders and scientists in the Sacramento regional business ecosystem.
These talented young people are trailblazers who have seen opportunities, created new products or started their own companies at an age when many people are still trying to figure out what they want to be when they grow up. The candidates are all under 25 by the end of this year, and they live or work in local counties.
Rishi Ambavanekar, 17, and Rohan Kulkarni, 18
Co-founders of Ask Geri Inc.
Two teens from Folsom saw how isolated elderly people at care homes can become, so they created Ask Geri Inc. to use AI to help elderly people feel less lonely.
Several years ago, Rishi Ambavanekar’s grandfather was in a hospital with leukemia. Because of the pandemic, people couldn’t visit him, and his grandfather felt social isolation. Ambavanekar learned about AI on YouTube tutorials. He worked with another student from his high school, co-founder Rohan Kulkarni, and they founded Ask Geri while students at Vista del Lago High School.
Kulkarni had volunteered at an elder-care home in Folsom when he was younger. He noticed during the pandemic that residents didn’t have a lot of contact with other people, and with group events like movie nights and bingo stopped, a lot of people were in their rooms and lonely. Some didn't get visits from family and friends, and they became isolated.
Then, around the end of 2022, with the rapid evolution of large language models and generative artificial intelligence, Ask Geri's founders saw providing companionship at care homes using AI could be a huge benefit for residents. The software gets to the know the user. It learns about them, and it remembers conversations, and it uses those older conversations to interact with the user. Kulkarni said Ask Geri users see it as a friend.
Ask Geri is a completely verbal interface once installed, which is important for the end users who might not be comfortable with technology. It requires only one button to start it, and then Ask Geri begins to have “meaningful conversations” with the users.
Ask Geri will start by asking questions. It remembers and stores the person’s interests and hobbies. It doesn’t store medical or personal identifiable information, he said. The company’s users have over 10,000 hours logged on the app. They have gotten the app introduced to senior living community operator Eskaton. The Ask Geri app is completely free to the user. Ask Geri’s model is to be a business-to-business play for care homes and operators. The early technology was built by the founders, and then they got more advanced support from an outside consulting firm.
"Geri learns about you. It learns your name. It learns details. It learns about you the way you would learn about a friend,” Kulkarni said.
Kulkarni starts the University of California Berkeley in the fall with plans to study electrical engineering and computer science, and also to get a minor in business. Ambavanekar hasn’t decided yet where he wants to go to school, but he’s pretty sure he will be studying engineering and business. Ask Geri is a portfolio company at the Growth Factory technology accelerator in Rocklin, and the company made it through several rounds of the Sacramento Kings Capitalize contest this year.
