Ardvarq

Ardi, a student-facing AI degree advisor. You talk to it about your degree, and it reads your real requirements, checks prerequisites, and builds a semester schedule that actually works. The students who stand to gain the most from a university are usually the last to find what is inside it, and I built Ardvarq to close that gap.

• Lead founder and only engineer. Shipped the whole product solo by directing AI tooling. Co-founded with Gavi Fox.
• The data layer: ETL over ~10,000 courses and ~11,000 instructors, a 3-pass degree-audit parser, 12 live AI tool functions, and an “Ardi Score” from 25 years of course evaluations.
• A Whisper voice layer, a mobile-first frontend, Microsoft OAuth for CU, and analytics on every turn.
• A two-layer caching system that cut pilot compute from ~$1,700 to $430.

The hard problem in conversational AI advising is cost. I cached at the major-and-stage level instead of per student, so most of every request was already paid for, which got the pilot to an 82.9% hit rate and 54 cents a student.

The GPA inversion: the most-engaged students had the lowest GPAs. The tool reached the students the traditional system serves worst, an equity signal the field had not measured.

Ardvarq was my first company, and it became a crash course in the whole job.

• Built it from nothing to a product 2,000+ students used in one registration cycle.
• Sold into higher ed, one of the slowest and most relationship-driven markets there is.
• Learned how the system works from the inside: procurement, the registrar, security review, and who actually decides.
• Got my first real reps at raising money and hiring.

• Reached CU system leadership, and got senior operators across higher ed and software to advise us.
• Still building.