Indian American school student Aryan Saksena was crowned the winner of the 2026 High School Entrepreneurship and Artificial Intelligence Pitch Competition organised by the Stevens School of Business in the United States. The bright 10th-grade high school student’s major win is linked to his creation of a project titled ‘GradeLift,’ which aims to bridge the gap between students and teachers in “real classrooms” by challenging the misuse of generative AI in school.
Currently attending Pingry School in New Jersey, Saksena secured a $500 prize after taking the lead at the competition. Here’s what we know about his project and the US competition.
About Indian American student Aryan Saksena’s AI business idea
The Stevens School of Business describes Saksena’s GradeLift project as an “AI-powered, rubric-aligned revision coach,” which helps students improve their own work instead of generating new text for them. While polished essays are a mere ask away for the usual AI tools, their presented result often ends up erasing the learning process in between. Consequently, it erases the pathway to developing stronger writing skills.
Saksena’s GradeLift, on the other hand, provides meaningful feedback without actually generating the assignment itself. After analysing a student’s draft, it shared structured, criterion-based feedback directly linked to the teacher’s grading standards, as per Stevens’ official website. Voicing the challenges he faced while developing the project, Aryan told the school that he started with no formal coding experience.
To overcome the challenges in his path, Aryan says he “narrowed my focus to the core components that made GradeLift valuable: the rubric input, the student essay and the feedback output.” He also confessed that his business idea was fuelled by what he observed around himself.
“In my school library, I saw firsthand how students were misusing generative AI for writing assignments, which sparked the concept for GradeLift,” he told Stevens after his big win. “That experience taught me that strong business ideas are usually rooted in genuine problems you personally witness and understand. Instead of chasing trends, the key is to identify real friction points and design thoughtful solutions around them.”
He reiterated the same sentiment in a separate months-old social media post as well. Alluding to recent studies about the rising number of students openly admitting to unauthorised AI use on their school work, he claims to have met students from over twenty US states.
Despite all of them being different school and courses, Saksena circled in on the same pattern, as per his LinkedIn post. He narrowed down that students were using AI to finish homework without them understanding it, especially since essays were “polished or produced from start to finish with AI.” Another comment factor emerging in these conversations was “uncertainty about what responsible use of AI is actually supposed to look like.”
And so, Saksena came to the conclusion that simply banning or block such tools was not the answer, just like students blindly embracing them for their work wasn’t. This is where he envisions GradeLift stepping in, emphasising, “The goal is to keep your brain at the center, while using AI as a coach that supports your writing process, not a shortcut that replaces it.”
After the Stevens School of Business posted the official announcement related to the competition’s outcome, Saksena expressed his gratitude to the judges’ panel for the opportunity.
Taking to his official LinkedIn profile, he shared, “I’m excited to share that I won 1st place in the Stevens School of Business High School Entrepreneurship and Artificial Intelligence (AI) Pitch Competition. For my pitch, I presented GradeLift, a venture I’ve been building to help students improve their writing with clearer, faster feedback.”
In a separate post, he made a case for his venture by responding to American journalist and The Atlantic’s CEO, Nicholas Thompson’s citation of a new study on kids, AI and education suggesting that reliance on AI tools had surged to the extent that it was making children “dumber.”
Re-sharing Thompson’s post, he defended his business idea as a counter to the existing AI chatbot models on LinkedIn. “AI misuse is becoming more common in school. That’s why I built GradeLift,” he said. “GradeLift helps students get better at writing, without making students AI dependent.”
More about Aryan Saksena
Saksena is currently based in Warren, New Jersey, USA. He is a 10th-grade student at The Pingry School. Beyond his identity as the creator of GradeLift and a school student, he is also pursuing a remote internship at Zerodha, an Indian financial services company, according to his LinkedIn profile.
In addition to that, he also lists himself as the co-founder and chief growth officer of MyLaceLock, a child safety startup focussed on developing a shoelace-locking solution designed to reduce trip-and-fall risk among children. Having been associated with the venture since 2025, Aryan worked on brand deals and future partnerships to enhance its market presence.
As per his LinkedIn profile, MyLaceLock was founded during his participation in the LaunchX Entrepreneurship Program last year. He and his fellow co-founding team members Xichen Wu, Iha Vijay and Brielle Levesque were presented with a Certificate of Completion during the 2025 LaunchX Summer Program.
What is the AI pitch competition about?
Over 100 students, including Aryan, created business ideas integrated with AI for their respective pitches for the competition conducted by the Stevens School of Business. The US-based institution announced the winners list for the same in the first week of March, revealing that this year’s event marked the second edition of the High School Entrepreneurship and Artificial Intelligence Video Pitch Competition.
Offering high schools students a platform to showcase their entrepreneurial spirit through AI, the program requires each applicant to create a two-minute video pitch for their business idea. The presentation must highlight the problem their idea addresses and its solution. Moreover, the role of AI must be foregrounded through the same, while also establishing market analysis and its potential business impact.
All entrants’ submissions were ultimately judged on five criteria: innovation and creativity, application of AI, feasibility, presentation skills and business impact. The judging panel consisted of Stevens faculty, staff and alumni. Together, they decided the top three place holders, who were then awarded $500, $250 and $100, respectively.
“This competition challenges high school students with an entrepreneurial spirit to solve real-world problems using AI tools,” said Joelle Saad-Lessler, the Associate Dean of Undergraduates at the School of Business, as quoted by Stevens’ website.
“The competition perfectly reflects our mission to use technology for innovation that improves the world. The many clever, forward-thinking submissions we received highlight exactly the kind of creative, ambitious thinkers who thrive at Stevens and graduate ready to build, lead and shape the future of business through AI.”