Turning notes into knowledge

The camera lens stared past a stove with pots and pans. Two UC Irvine undergraduates, Abhi Arya and Rishi Srihari, adjusted a makeshift studio light in a cramped kitchen. They hit "record" on a MacBook, unaware that a simple product demo would introduce thousands of students to their vision.

The story of Opennote - a chatbot turned note-taking app - did not begin in a polished boardroom or a Silicon Valley office. It began in a student apartment at UC Irvine.

"We were trying to mimic how companies did launch videos," says Arya, a computer science and engineering major. "We uploaded the video and then kinda forgot about it until we started seeing our app usage spike like crazy, and we were like, 'What's going on?' We saw that the YouTube video gained 10,000 views in an hour. It ended up getting 650,000 views and skyrocketed our growth."

For Arya and Srihari, a computer science major, the viral moment was exciting, but it wasn't the beginning of the journey. That had started months earlier with a challenge familiar to almost every college student: sitting in crowded lecture halls, listening to one-size-fits-all presentations, taking pages of notes and struggling to ask questions.

The two young men understood this frustration because they had experienced it themselves.

"There are a lot of education tools built by industry professionals, but we wanted to approach it in a different way that spoke to students," Arya says. "Not just getting answers from ChatGPT but turning messy information into something you can practice, retain and learn from. We were just trying to help students directly and believed the hardest part of learning was not access to information but making sense of it."

Their idea came to life in 2024 for the LA Hacks competition among talented student teams from across the region. Arya and Srihari developed the first version of Opennote as an AI-powered educational platform that transformed static notes into an interactive learning experience. It earned first place at the event.

Rather than asking students to learn through another standalone chatbot, the entrepreneurs wanted AI to work inside the places where students study. As the platform evolved, Opennote became what Srihari describes as "the AI tutor that lives in your notes."

Instead of forcing users to switch between applications, the system integrates with tools students already rely on, including Notion, Google Drive and other productivity platforms. Opennote understands existing notes, generates personalized explanations, creates visual learning materials and even produces narrated educational content directly alongside a student's work. It's designed to feel less like another AI application and more like a natural extension of how students learn.

Following their victory at LA Hacks, the Opennote team quickly gained recognition at UC Irvine and among peers. "Vedant Vyas, a software engineering student at the University of Guelph [in Ontario, Canada], reached out to Rishi and me on LinkedIn," Arya says. "We talked to him and quickly realized that we were aligned, with similar ideas, so we brought him on. He became our third co-founder when we incorporated in January 2025."

That year, Opennote was accepted into Y Combinator, widely regarded as the world's premier startup accelerator, which helped launch such companies as Airbnb, Stripe, DoorDash, Dropbox and Reddit.

But turning a program into a real company required more than technical talent. It required a community that believed in the founders before anyone else did. For Opennote, that community was the UC Irvine ANTrepreneur Center - which became part of a growing support system that encouraged the team from the very beginning.

"When students come to the ANTrepreneur Center, we're not here to tell them what to do," says director Ryan Foland. "We're here to help them figure out what the next steps are, and then we're here for them when they come back. We tell students they don't have to have an idea to get engaged and start or understand entrepreneurship."

According to Arya, he and Srihari leaned on the facility's mentors for guidance, used its collaborative workspaces, and regularly sought feedback while refining both their product and business strategy.

"The ANTrepreneur Center was really helpful in terms of initial ideation and getting this off the ground," Arya says. "We've felt like we can come to the center for anything we need, and they've been incredibly helpful and supportive throughout our journey."

With that early institutional backing, the duo entered and won LA Hacks in 2024, earned admission into Y Combinator, raised more than $4 million in venture funding and, ultimately, agreed to be acquired by Reducto - where they're still actively involved.

The center's support also marked the beginning of a relationship that would come full circle as Arya and Srihari have returned not as student founders looking for advice but as mentors inspiring the next generation of ANTrepreneurs to build something even bigger.

They visited the ANTrepreneur Center's AI innovation course, sharing firsthand lessons about building AI products, raising venture capital and navigating one of the fastest-moving industries in technology. They also mentored students in the winter startup course, which is patterned after Y Combinator's own startup school.

"When we went to Y Combinator, we were the only students that weren't from MIT, Stanford, Harvard or Caltech," Arya says. "So it's really important to me to come and give back to the UCI community and share our story - that you really can do what you put your mind to."