Neil Kumar has been known to leave a water bottle or a jacket at school or the gym, marking himself among the millions of Americans whose forgotten belongings end up in a lost-and-found box or a landfill every year.
Now Kumar is the founder of FindIt, an app designed to provide an AI-powered solution to recovering what’s been lost.
The 15-year-old freshman at Bellevue (Wash.) High School was recently selected as one of four innovators to participate in the city’s Civic Innovation Challenge, an initiative seeking technology solutions to municipal challenges.
FindIt will be used on a pilot basis at Bellevue College to test the app’s usability and effectiveness among students, staff and visitors and evaluate its potential for broader deployment.
“I’ve always been interested in how technology can solve our real world problems,” Kumar told GeekWire.
According to statistics cited by the website Lostings, over 400 million items are lost and found every year in the U.S. The estimated value of lost items is over $5 billion per year.
Kumar wants his creation to help address the economic aspect of all of that loss, and also the sustainability concern. His tagline is “Buy less, lose even less.”
Available on iOS, FindIt works when someone in charge of a lost-and-found system, at a school for instance, takes a photo of a recovered item and uploads that photo. The image is processed by artificial intelligence, which generates a description, such as “blue water bottle with red sticker and white top.”
A student looking for a lost item types a description into FindIt, and the app’s AI scans uploaded listings to find the best matches.
Kumar said the easy process of searching via a mobile app eclipses traditional systems that require a person to physically return to a place where they may have left something.
He started working on the project a year ago and FindIt was among 23 competitive applicants reviewed and judged in the civic challenge. The three other companies and ideas that were accepted are:
- Certivo, a Seattle company with an AI-driven platform that provides visibility into vendor compliance across procurement and cybersecurity.
- Legislaide, a Denver company using AI to analyze municipal codes, legislative history and state statutes, allowing staff to run plain English searches across agendas, minutes, ordinances, resolutions, reports and more.
- Juganu, an Israeli company with a smart lighting solution to illuminate curbside activity while monitoring real-time usage patterns to support city and Bellevue College transportation and public safety initiatives.
FindIt was also selected for the Thermo Fisher Junior Innovators Challenge, and Kumar said he was recognized in the top 300 junior innovators in the U.S. this year.
The app is currently deployed at Odle Middle School in Bellevue. Kumar envisions the tool someday being available to more schools as well as airports, workplaces, public transit agencies and elsewhere.
Kumar, who has worked with Sustainability Ambassadors, a program that helps develop student leadership skills, thinks FindIt is just the start, and he’d like to be an entrepreneur in the future.
“I like to solve problems using technology, and help people using those solutions,” he said.
