Their next hill: Innovate WithIN. What stumped the team last year suddenly fueled the co-founders’ engines. Ao, Croslyn, and Muvva won their region, received an additional $3,000 in capital, and advanced to the 2022 Innovate WithIN State Finals. During weekly Zoom meetings, the three were given the opportunity to pitch, receive feedback, and hear stories from a variety of experienced entrepreneurs including, but not limited to, Jeff Hoffman (Chairman of the Global Entrepreneurship Network), Sunny Lu Williams (CEO of TechServe), and Jeff Ready (CEO of Scale Computing).

While Intertwined did not place at State Finals, the trio did not look back. Using the lessons and experiences learned from STARTedUP programming, they adventured on the Tampa Immersion Trip, connecting and networking with serial entrepreneurs. In Tampa, Intertwined gained a valuable resource — a defunct financial literacy curriculum that now formed the basis of their “Basic Curriculum” offering.

A few weeks later, the team announced they had secured a $30,000 pre-seed investment, making the team join some of America’s youngest to raise venture capital. Working with Evansville-based software developer firm Lieberman Technologies, the Intertwined platform was completed in the fall of 2022. With the integration of AI in mind, the platform uses AI to help write curriculum and knowledge assessment content and for student interactions. For example, suppose a student misses a quiz question about how to budget a biweekly paycheck. In that case, instead of moving on to the next question, the AI automatically rewords the question and corresponding answer choices in a way that the student might better comprehend. This continues until the student answers the question correctly, demonstrating foundational understanding before the student can advance in the curriculum.

Intertwined worked with the Indiana Department of Education and several education service centers to pilot test Intertwined’s minimum viable product in classrooms across the state. They’ve accelerated company growth with their sales cycle, using AI to connect with more than 500 potential leads. The team has engaged with interested educators across 25 states, potentially impacting over 30,000 students. In the spring of 2023, Intertwined negotiated a partnership with Students Teaching Finance, a national nonprofit dedicated to increasing financial literacy and combating economic inequality nationwide through a network of volunteer educators. Most recently, they closed a deal with the YMCA of Southwestern Indiana to provide financial education resources for their after-school programs.

Because of these efforts, Ao was awarded Student Entrepreneur of the Year at the 24th Annual TechPoint Mira Awards in April of 2023. Honoring Indiana’s “Best of Tech,” per TechPoint’s article release, “the STARTedUP Foundation, which nominated Ao for the Mira Award, says Intertwined ‘has reimagined the way financial literacy education is taught in the classroom’ and ‘is on track to become one of the most promising student startups in the region.’”