Bet on Me

I’m Rohan. I’m 18, study CS at Purdue, and I’ve been building things since I was 9. Right now I’m focused on consumer AI under https://rhogpt.ai, and I’m raising a \$25‑50k post‑money SAFE at a \$4M cap (no discount).

This post is for anyone considering backing me. It’s not a full business plan–just a window into who I am, what I’ve done, and how I think.

the quick version

• I’ve shipped across infra, ML, product, trading, and more.
• I self-host all my stuff on my own hardware in a physical datacenter i’ve been patronizing for years. No AWS bills (yet).
• I’ve done everything from building/selling Minecraft mods (where I started, 9-12) → flipping german cars (15-16) → building for Verizon (16-17) → trading the chess world championship using ML (18) → quant trading memecoins (18) → research making LLMs more efficient (dropping soon).
• My blog (this one) has had 30k+ readers, with 10+ posts over 1k.
• I move fast, learn faster, and I’m obsessed with the edges of what’s possible.

Right now, I’m building AI-native consumer products.

People know AI will change their life they just don’t know how. I aim to show them.

what i’m building (now)

• Kara – an AI friend you can text like a real person. Not a chatbot, not a sycophant–just a distinct voice with memory, boundaries, and presence. Kara has 50+ beta users and is live now at kara.rhogpt.ai or via iMessage at +1 (650) 382-3244.

• Rhoessay – in progress. A structured writing tool built off my own internal workflow that can produce graduate level essays/long form content (>20pg) from scratch in under an hour. It decomposes the writing process (outline → gathering evidence → paragraphs → editing) and makes it interactive and transparent–not a magic GPT blob.

Both tools are part of the same thread: making agents that are actually useful, with real interaction design. I love curating UX. After these two are deployed, I plan to use this strategy:

1. Take the AI I use in my everyday
2. Put it behind a frontend
3. Distribute

Ex: if you email me there’s a big chance an AI will respond, or at least tell me what your message is.

I’m using TikTok + Twitter to grow both. I’m learning distribution the same way I learned ML–fast, by doing.

why i’m raising

I could go get a summer internship and play it safe.

But instead I want to go all-in. To do that, I need:

• Personal runway (SF isn’t cheap)
• Infra + API costs (Sonnet, Llama, etc)
• Maybe some money to finetune kara if needed (GPU time)

\$20–30k gets me everything I need to build, launch, iterate, and grow. That’s it. No big team, no overhead. Just focus.

what’s after

There is a bigger picture, these disparate products are experiments that generate real signal.

Everything I’m learning building Rhoessay and Kara is part of a bigger plan: building infra that lets anyone create and deploy personal AI agents. Think workflows, tools, memory, routing–the hard stuff.

But I’m not starting with a B2B pitch deck. I’m starting with users, product, distribution–and using that to backsolve into what needs to exist.

why me

1. I’m technical enough to build
2. I’m curious enough to learn what I don’t know.
3. I’m fast enough to make things happen before most people have picked a stack.

And I’ve already lived at least five different lives online: modder, hustler, quant, student, founder.

I can turn a small check into serious leverage and I’m building the kind of products and systems that will define how AI actually gets used.

Email me: rohanganapa@gmail.com
Text me: +1 925 665 4168