In the fall of 2024, six college students joined forces to start an AI company together. Five of them had met while studying computer science, computer engineering, and electrical engineering at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. The sixth, its CEO, was pursuing a degree in childhood and adolescent development at Sacramento State, with an eye on becoming a grade-school teacher. That wasn’t the only thing that made him an outlier. He also happened to have been in the tech industry for well over 30 years—longer than his fellow founders had been alive.
The Georgia Tech students are Ian Boraks, Jacob Justice, Drake Kelly, Ella McCheney, and Abhinav Vemulapalli, all of whom happen to be 21. The Sac State student/tech veteran is Bill Nguyen, whose past startups amount to a guided tour of Silicon Valley trends over the years, from “push” technology to unified messaging to digital music to social networking to telehealth. Their new company, Olive.is—Olive for short—is developing technology to make AI better at grasping the full meaning of spoken communications, as conveyed by elements, such as inflection and dialect, that current models may gloss over. It plans to offer its tech as a service for enriching AI-powered applications in education and other areas.
Olive’s name references the company’s ambitious hope of fostering better understanding—an olive branch, if you will—between humans and machines. It’s still in the process of researching and developing its AI model, and has raised $5 million in seed funding from education-focused venture capital firm Owl Ventures and Georgia Tech. The unusual founding team was a selling point to Owl, which also backed one of Nguyen’s previous ventures, Hazel Health.
As students themselves, the Georgia Tech founders “are deeply connected and have a lot of recency with the ideal cohort of potential users that are going to benefit from all this technology,” says Owl’s Lyman Missimer. “But Bill is giving this team the full kind of Silicon Valley hustle out in the middle of Atlanta.”
