We Won a Global Hackathon. Then We Built a Real Company. Here's What Changed.

One of us spent 18 years in a high school classroom. The other leads enterprise AI strategy at the University of St. Thomas. Together we built RealPath Learning — and won the SheBuilds Season 2 Buildathon out of nearly 2,000 global applicants.

The problem we couldn't stop thinking about: teachers spend 3 hours differentiating a single lesson — and a 2024 DOJ ruling just made that a federal compliance crisis for every K-12 district in America.

So we built something. Using Lovable, Claude, and a hackathon deadline, we went from idea to working product fast. Now we have a real company, district pilots , and a $500K seed raise in motion.

This session is the unfiltered story: what tools we used, what broke, what surprised us, and what we wish we'd known about building a compliance-driven EdTech startup as two non-traditional founders. If you've ever had an idea you thought required a "real" developer — or a "real" background — this session is for you.

• Beginner
• Development
• Startups
• Emerging Tech
• AI/ML
• Design
• Community