SwitchPoint AI wins $150,000 in Their First-Ever Pitch Competition

A last-minute application led to a major win for Northwestern students Yash Agrawal and Henry Michaelson, who recently secured $150,000 at their very first pitch competition. 

The win marks a pivotal moment for the duo, who co-founded Switchpoint AI, a venture that aims to optimize AI resource usage for businesses by intelligently routing user requests to the most cost-effective AI models. By optimizing model choice per request, businesses achieve up to 40% in average cost savings with Switchpoint, according to their website.

“Put in your question, put in your task, and you’ll get the right model every single time,” Agrawal explained. 

Michaelson came across the pitch competition by the Honors Fund unexpectedly in a newsletter from The Garage. All in all, the application took him five minutes, linking their website and LinkedIn profiles and hoping for the best. 

“I thought that there was probably a 0.1 percent chance,” Michaelson recalled. Yet just a week later, they received an email stating they were selected as one of six finalists. They had five days to prepare for the pitch.

“We had the lowest lows and the highest highs during that week,” Agrawal said. “It literally went from ‘We’re winning this competition, no doubt about it,’ to ‘Why are we even doing this? We’re guaranteed to fail.’”

During the virtual competition, Agrawal and Michaelson joined on separate devices, only one wall separating them within their shared apartment. When Switchpoint AI was announced as the winner, Agrawal recalled jumping out of his seat with joy. “It was an unreal feeling,” Agrawal said. 

Switchpoint AI is not the first rodeo for this co-founder duo. In fact, the idea for Switchpoint AI came directly from their experiences with their previous startup, Cogssay, an AI-driven college admissions essay feedback and evaluation tool.

“One of the big issues that we faced in Cogssay was that even if our system was pretty efficient with the AI usage, it still cost us bucketloads of money,” Agrawal said. “We were like, can we optimize this?”

As Residents in The Garage, both Agrawal and Michaelson agree that The Garage played a crucial role in their success – but not for the reason you might think.

“The biggest thing about The Garage to me is not the resources they provide in hardware and so on. It’s the people,” Agrawal said. He specifically highlighted the support from Executive Director Mike Raab and Associate Director Brylan Donaldson. “Mike was very helpful with how to deal with contracts and signings and who to go to. He’s been useful tremendously on that aspect,” Agrawal shared, adding, “Brylan is someone we go to literally every week to learn more about AI because he’s very informed about AI.” 

And of course, The Garage’s newsletter which first announced the competition proved indispensable.

“We wouldn’t have found the pitch competition without it. There’s zero chance,” Michaelson said. 

Looking ahead, Switchpoint AI aims to leverage the funding to accelerate technical development. Their next goal is to raise a seed fund as soon as possible.

Their partnership, both as two-time co-founders and roommates, remains the cornerstone of Switchpoint’s journey – and perhaps their greatest competitive edge. 

“We have a co-founder relationship that I at first didn’t really understand is somewhat rare: not that we’re always on the same page, but we always know what the other one is thinking,” Michaelson said. “There’s a certain level of trust that we are able to have because of that.” 

‍