Three students in Carnegie Mellon University's Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence and Innovation program(opens in new window) won the Graduate Entrepreneurship Club(opens in new window)'s Hack-a-Startup competition.

Ranadeep Singh, Vishhvak Srinivasan and Ilyas Bankole-Hameed, all students in the School of Computer Science's Language Technologies Institute(opens in new window), won the CMU competition on Nov. 15 for their project HyPer.ai, a generative AI system that writes hyper-personalized emails and LinkedIn messages for users.

The team came up with the idea through their own struggles during recruitment season. When they spent time personalizing a message to ask for a referral, their chances of getting a reply were much higher compared to when they sent a cold email. Then it clicked: They could use artificial intelligence and natural language processing to automate this process and save time while reaching out to more people.

The current version of HyPer.ai aims to assist recruiters and business-to-business salespeople with outreach. It scans a receiver's LinkedIn profile and factors in the sender's intent to generate a full, personalized message to achieve increased replies and callbacks. The team hopes to expand beyond the project's initial business solutions to develop a free version for students to use in job searches.

As one of the top three Hack-a-Startup teams, the HyPer.ai team had the chance to pitch their project at a Corporate Startup Lab forum(opens in new window) to gain exposure, users and funding opportunities. They presented to more than 100 executives from across the country on Nov. 16.

The team is looking for recruiters and salespeople to enroll in their alpha testing. Sign up by filling out this form(opens in new window).