A 15-year-old founder's AI journey

Meet Divyanshu Mhatre.

Divyanshu is based in Mumbai, India. He is only 15 years old and has been obsessed with AI since the age of 9 (2019) - before ChatGPT even existed.

Currently he is growing Megalo, an AI learning platform.

I was super inspired by Elon Musk's story from a Bloomberg video (below) I saw back then, when not everyone knew him like we do now.

While most kids my age are playing games, I'm building full AI applications without spending a single penny. My journey started at 13 during the AI boom, and starting early was my best decision.

At 14, I co-founded Impic Tech Community with my 17-year-old partner Zaid. Impic was a tech community for people to share resources, experience and providing help.

We got 500+ members in three weeks with 5 team members.

Everyone was shocked that one of the co-founders was still in school while they were in college or working at top institutes 🙂 This experience taught me that age could be an advantage, not a limitation.

After learning from my community experiences, I started building Megalo solo in June 2025.

Megalo is a dual-purpose AI learning platform:

The AI playground

One part is an AI playground where users create flashcards, generate note summaries, chat with AI, plus upload unlimited documents and images - all completely free.

The tool directory

The other part is a tool directory featuring 1,200+ curated tools (with AI-powered search).

I mainly used v0 and the Cursor AI IDE to build Megalo. I built and hosted the initial structure on v0, and used Cursor for subsequent code edits and generation.

I work on a really old 4GB RAM, no-GPU PC, so it is hard to deploy directly through my PC. I use the free Gemini API for the AI part and got the domain using the GitHub Student Developer Pack free for 1 year.

Everything built using only free resources without spending a single $, while managing school too.

Right now I am not monetizing the site - it’s free forever.

But I do collect users emails from users who use the app. I am planning to launch a newsletter off of it at some point. It’s going to focus on useful niche tools and their usecases.

Something incredible happened when I started sharing my journey authentically online.

I began getting attention from major industry figures and influential tech leaders. David Holtz, founder of Midjourney even follows me on X. This taught me that being genuine about your story, regardless of age, resonates with people who matter.

The “young person privilege” was real, and sharing my learning process opened connections I never expected.

My biggest breakthrough: 100k+ collective views in my first 3 days on Reddit.

Since the launch of Megalo in Juni 2025, and in just 4-5 weeks of marketing through X (launch tweet below) and Reddit (launch post below), I achieved 3,000 total visitors and 170+ email signups.

As I always say, "Never stop believing in yourself and keep learning.”

Thank you for reading my story.

Divyanshu is active on X. Reach out to him.