Entrepreneurship

Her School Blocked ChatGPT. At 17, She Built An AI Startup Anyway.

Navya Tuteja, a high school senior in Virginia, launched Raaha, a free tool that helps neurodivergent job seekers check whether a job fits them before they apply. It passed 1,000 users in about two months. Here is what young builders can learn from how she did it.

Foundra Kids·7 min read

Her School Blocked ChatGPT. At 17, She Built An AI Startup Anyway.

Imagine your school blocks the most popular AI tools on its Wi-Fi. Most students would shrug and move on. Navya Tuteja built an AI company.

Navya is a 17-year-old senior at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, outside Washington, D.C. About two months ago she launched Raaha, a free website that helps neurodivergent job seekers figure out whether a job is a good fit for them before they apply.

Neurodivergent is a word for people whose brains work in ways that differ from what is considered typical, such as people with ADHD, autism, or dyslexia. Many of them have strengths that employers want. But job listings rarely explain what the work is really like day to day.

According to Fortune, Raaha already has more than 1,000 users and 20,000 job listings. Business Today reported that Navya bootstrapped it herself, which means she built it without outside investors.

Her story has a lot to teach young builders, even if you never plan to touch AI.

Where the idea came from

The idea did not start with technology. It started with her family.

Navya's mother has partial hearing loss. Watching her mom deal with challenges at work, Navya noticed something about job posts. They list what employers want from a candidate. But they say very little about what the job actually feels like.

Is the office loud? Are there lots of surprise meetings? Is most communication by phone or by writing? For many people, those details decide whether a job will go well. And they are almost never in the listing.

That gap became Raaha. The site scores job listings on several factors so candidates get a more realistic picture of the role before they spend hours applying.

Here is the lesson: the best ideas often come from noticing a problem that someone you love deals with. You see it up close. You understand why it matters. And you already know one person who wants it solved.

Building with limits

Navya's school blocks ChatGPT, Claude, and similar tools on its network. You might think that would stop someone from building an AI startup. Instead, she said it shaped how she works.

"It made me use it in school way less," she told Fortune. "So I guess, as annoying as it was, it was still good, in a way."

Navya wrote Raaha's core algorithm herself. An algorithm is a set of step-by-step rules a computer follows to solve a problem. She mainly used AI for mechanical jobs, like cleaning up the website's design.

For schoolwork, she skips AI entirely. "I try to do all my learning myself, especially for stuff I have exams for," she said.

That is a smart balance. Use tools to save time on chores. Do the thinking yourself on the parts that matter most. When you understand how your own product works, you can fix it, explain it, and improve it.

Free first, money later

Raaha is free right now. That might sound strange for a business. But it is a common plan for new products.

When something is free, more people try it. More users means more feedback. And more feedback helps you make the product better faster.

Navya has thought about how money could come later. According to Business Today, her eventual business model could involve employers and workforce organizations paying to use the platform or to improve their job listings.

Notice who pays in that plan. Not the job seekers, who may already be having a hard time. Instead, the companies that want to hire them. Employers have a reason to pay: better listings could bring them better matches and fewer people who quit early.

When you plan your own business, ask two questions:

Who gets the most help from this?
Who has a reason, and the money, to pay for it?

Sometimes those are the same person. Sometimes, like with Raaha, they are different.

There is one more benefit to starting free. It lets you prove people want what you built before you ask anyone for money. When Navya talks to an employer someday, she can point to real users and real listings instead of a guess.

More than one project

Navya did not stop at one idea. She is president of her school's AI club. She also built a second tool called Legible.

Legible turns special-education documents, such as IEPs and 504 plans, into plain language. These are school plans that describe the support a student with a disability should receive. They can be long and full of hard words, which makes them tough for families to read.

She built Legible after noticing that AI summaries of disability information often left out where the information came from, which parents need to trust it. So she also proposed a transparency standard called Traceable Accessibility. She has pitched it to local state senators and discussed it with the U.S. Department of Education.

That shows another founder skill: when you solve one problem, keep your eyes open. You often find the next problem right next to the first one.

If you want help organizing a big idea into small steps, Foundra has planning tools for young builders and their families. A notebook with three columns, "problem," "who has it," and "first test," works great too.

What Navya thinks about AI in school

You might expect a teen AI founder to be angry about the ban. Her view is more careful than that.

"I don't think banning it is the solution," she said. "I think you have to regulate it in the right way."

She also worries that some people use AI in ways that make them think less. "People just don't know how to use it properly," she said.

Business Today pointed to polling from RAND that found the share of students regularly using AI for homework rose from 48% to 62% between May and December 2025. Two-thirds of those students said AI was hurting their critical thinking.

So here is a good family conversation: when does a tool help you learn, and when does it do the learning for you? There is no single right answer for every task. But asking the question is a habit great builders share.

Try it: your own "fit check" project

You do not need to code to practice the thinking behind Raaha. Try this with a notebook.

Pick something people choose between. Summer camps, after-school clubs, or even restaurants for a family dinner.
Ask three people what they wish they knew before choosing. Maybe "how loud is it?" or "do I need to bring anything?"
Turn their answers into a checklist of five questions.
Score three real options using your checklist. Give each question a 1, 2, or 3.
Show your scores to the people you asked. Did the checklist help them choose? What would they change?

That is the core of a product. You found a gap, listened to users, built a simple tool, and tested it.

A safety note: if you ever build something online that collects information about people, have a parent or guardian help you. Personal details, especially about health or disabilities, need extra care.

What to take from the story

Navya Tuteja built a useful product before finishing high school. She did it by:

Starting with a real person's problem, her mom's.
Doing the hard thinking herself, and using tools for chores.
Keeping it free to grow, while planning who could pay later.
Noticing the next problem and building for it too.
Thinking carefully about how technology should be used.

She plans to go to college, but says she would consider running Raaha full-time if it keeps growing. Either way, she has already learned what many adults are still figuring out.

Frequently asked questions

What is Raaha? Raaha is a free website built by 17-year-old Navya Tuteja. It helps neurodivergent job seekers see whether a job listing fits their needs before they apply.

How many people use Raaha? Fortune reported more than 1,000 users and 20,000 job listings about two months after launch.

What does neurodivergent mean? It describes people whose brains work differently from what is considered typical, including people with ADHD, autism, or dyslexia.

Did Navya use AI to build Raaha? She wrote the main algorithm herself and used AI mostly for mechanical tasks like website design cleanup.

How can kids start a project like this? Pick a problem someone you know faces, ask a few people about it, build a simple checklist or prototype, and test it with them. Get an adult's help with anything that collects personal information.