AI Track Prize winner - HackVerse 5.0 (NITK Surathkal)

HackVerse 5.0, the annual hackathon at NITK Surathkal, with over 2000+ participants. I built with Alfiya Fatima and Yuktha P S as Team State NightOwls, and we won the AI track for InvestBuddies.

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What we built: InvestBuddies

Getting first time investors started at low stakes. Many investments have a fixed minimum amount you have to put in, which is more than a beginner wants to risk on a first try, and they are usually left to learn the basics somewhere else before they can judge the investment at all. InvestBuddies lets a group split that minimum between them, so each person puts in a small share instead of the full amount, and keeps the learning inside the app.

Engineering:

• Transactional multi-party state. A group commitment is only valid once every member has agreed, so accepts run as transactions over a live synced document: no half committed pools, no stale views, no refresh.
• Generated per user instead of authored. An LLM writes each quiz from the user's profile with their history as a no-repeat constraint and returns structured JSON, so content scales to every user without anyone writing it.
• Retrieval grounded assistant. An explainer on the exact topic a user missed is chunked, embedded and indexed, then pulled back as context at query time, which keeps answers on that topic instead of drifting generic.

The retrieval layer runs on GroClake, Plotch's own AI stack, which is what the bounty was for.

Repository: https://github.com/chetanr25/InvestBuddies