Three Friends, One Idea: Building an AI Startup as Students
We met at our student tennis club, TC De Uithof. Soon, we realised we had more in common than just tennis — we were also in the same master’s programme, Business Informatics. Working together on projects, commissions, and other activities, our friendship grew quickly. What started as studying, socialising, and playing sports regularly soon turned into conversations about entrepreneurship, ideas, and the question: “What if we started something together?”
The opportunity came sooner than expected when we joined the master’s course Science-based Entrepreneurship. Instead of focusing solely on writing a theoretical business plan, we were tasked with building a real startup — from idea to MVP. The course featured inspiring guest speakers, honest lessons about failure and success, and, most importantly, plenty of space to actually build. Every week, we worked in Playground, Utrecht University’s centre for student entrepreneurship, on something that — for the first time — truly felt like our own.
Like many budding entrepreneurs, we had no shortage of ideas — our real challenge was deciding which one to pursue. At the time, only one thing was certain: we wanted to work with AI. Not because it was trendy, but because we could see its potential to make work smarter and more efficient. Through one of our professors, we learned about opportunities to apply AI in the legal sector — and that got our cogs turning.
We dove into field research by contacting lawyers and legal professionals through LinkedIn and our network, sometimes meeting multiple people in a single day. Those conversations gave us a wealth of insights — not just about transcription, but about the everyday frustrations of their work. We saw, for example, how much time was wasted in Outlook: endless searching for emails, missing context, and repetitive tasks that could easily be automated.
That’s how the idea for DeepCase was born — an AI assistant within Outlook, designed specifically for lawyers. By the end of the course, we had put together an MVP and spoken to around a hundred legal professionals, from small law firms to large international offices on the Zuidas.
Everything came to a head at the final pitches, where we presented our idea to other teams and investors, Shark Tank-style.
To top it off, we won the prize for best pitch and received €1,000 in seed funding from PlayGrant to develop our idea further.
We were at an all-time high. Our MVP was shaping up, we had talked to dozens of legal professionals, and even won had the capital to build DeepCase further. But doubts were starting to creep in. One question we heard more and more often was: “But can’t Copilot do this too?” It made us pause. Despite all our research and conversations, we realised we didn’t have a legal background ourselves. To truly make a mark in legal tech, deep domain knowledge was essential — and that gap was starting to weigh on us.
Instead of pushing forward blindly, we chose to take a step back and reflect. We returned to the core of what excited us: AI that helps people spend less time on repetitive tasks. Aidan brought a sharp insight from his experience with AI automations: many existing tools are simply too technical for non-technical users — and there's a lot of strides to be made there!
That’s how Ajora came to be. It’s a platform that lets you create your own custom AI automations and agents using natural language. No complicated flows or technical jargon. Simply describe in your own words what you want AI to do, and it handles everything else, running 24/7 so you don’t have to.
Our mission is to make AI’s potential accessible to as many non-technical people as possible. We believe AI shouldn’t be reserved for developers, engineers, or large tech companies. It should be for the people who work hard every day and often get bogged down in repetitive, time-consuming tasks. By automating these tasks more intelligently, we free up space — for creativity, meaningful human interaction, better decisions, and work that truly feels rewarding.
We don’t see AI as a replacement for people. We see it as a tool that empowers them — technology that supports, rather than overwhelms. With Ajora, we want to help create a world where more people can take control of their work, their time, and their focus, without needing to be technical experts first.
We didn’t just change our product — we also changed our name. DeepCase became Ajora (a combination of our names), reflecting a broader vision, a more international outlook, and our ambitions more clearly.
Nearly a year since DeepCase, we’re fully focused on building Ajora's MVP. We’re speaking with potential users across a variety of fields to pinpoint where we can deliver real value first. And we’re doing all of this while writing our master’s theses, working to make ends meet, and trying to maintain a social life. It can be chaotic and challenging, but above all, it’s incredibly rewarding. With guidance from experienced coaches and mentors at Playground and the seed funding that helped us take our first steps, we feel confident that we’re truly on our way to new heights.
Interested in AI, automation, and building smart tools? We'd love to connect!