In April 2025, at Product Genesis, the flagship business event of Vividhotsava 2025 at Chhatrapati Shahu Ji Maharaj University (CSJMU), our team won 1st prize for BrandHive — a startup concept to empower small businesses through AI-generated content and UGC collaborations. The prize was presented by Prof. Vinay Kumar Pathak, the Vice Chancellor.
This wasn't a hackathon. It was a business pitch
Product Genesis judged market insight, a lean MVP structure, and a revenue model — not just working code. Over two days we refined the pitch itself as much as the product: problem validation, user acquisition plan, and a story a non-technical judge could follow in three minutes.
What I took from pitching to a Vice Chancellor
Authority in the room changes what you emphasise. A room of engineers wants architecture. A Vice Chancellor wants to know who this helps and why it matters at scale. Same product, completely different opening thirty seconds.
This recognition is more than a win — it's validation of the problem we're solving, the market we're reaching, and the solution we're building. This is chapter one.
Where this started
GenAI engineer and AI product builder with 2+ years shipping production-grade AI systems: RAG pipelines, fine-tuned LLMs, hybrid retrieval and multi-modal apps across vision, speech and OCR, architected end to end from ingestion to deployment. Leads engineering for SCULT INDIA's 14-member team, founded the 500+ member TechVerse Enclave community and has mentored 200+ students. Three hackathon first prizes: Changethon 2025 (IIT Roorkee), Product Genesis at Vividhotsava 2025 (CSJMU Kanpur) and BYTEBATTLE (MeetKats).
Open to GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks at colleges. Email pranjulrathour41@gmail.com.
