Thaw | Devpost

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Inspiration

Almost all startups face the same painful beginning — and we've even seen it firsthand with YC founders we know personally, who spent months cold emailing investors, recruiters, and potential partners before getting a single meaningful response. That story isn't unique — nearly every startup founder has lived it. Cold outreach is broken. Low response rates, clogged inboxes, and wasted time plague both sides of every conversation. We built Thaw to fix that.

What it does

Thaw is a dedicated platform for warm, intelligent business introductions. Companies and startups create verified profiles and declare their intent — whether they're looking to invest, find investment, buy technology, or form strategic partnerships. Our AI matching engine pairs businesses based on mutual goals and shared interests, then helps kickstart the conversation with Gemini-powered suggested messages for agentic outreach. No cold emails. No spam. Just the right connection, at the right time.

How we built it

We built Thaw using React and Next.js on the frontend, with Node.js handling backend routing. Supabase powers our database and storage, Auth0 handles authentication, and we deployed via Vercel. Our AI layer leverages the Gemini API for intelligent matching and suggested message generation. We also incorporated Claude and OpenAI Codex into our development workflow to accelerate building.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was time — 24 hours moves fast when you're building a full stack product from scratch. Prioritizing which features to ship versus cut was a constant battle. We also hit restrictions on free tier API usage which limited how far we could scale the AI features during the hackathon, but it pushed us to be creative and lean with our implementation.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of shipping a working product in 24 hours that solves a real problem we genuinely care about. More than the tech though, we're proud of how our team showed up — locked in a room together, fully dedicated, collaborating and building something from zero to demo-ready. That energy was something special.

What we learned

We learned how powerful modern AI tooling is when you fully lean into it. Integrating Gemini, Auth0, Supabase, and Vercel together in a single sprint taught us how to move fast with best-in-class tools rather than reinventing the wheel. We also learned that scoping ruthlessly is a skill — knowing what NOT to build is just as important as knowing what to build.

What's next for Thaw

We're planning to build out tiered subscription plans with Stripe integration and pro feature gating to support scaling. The next major milestone is onboarding larger enterprise companies onto the platform and expanding the AI matching engine to handle more complex multi-intent relationships. The cold email era is ending — Thaw is what comes next.