Over the past two years, seniors Ayush Garg and Ryan McCarroll spent many hours, when they weren’t in class or studying, developing their web-based AI company, AnswerThis.io. Their hard work paid off when San Francisco-based Y Combinator, one of the top business accelerators in the U.S., chose them from among 10,000 applicants to join their Fall 2025 cohort. They were among 109 selected — an acceptance rate of just 1 percent.

“It's an incredible honor that I get to experience and thrive in this program alongside my good friend and roommate, Ayush,” McCarroll said.

While they participate in Y Combinator’s intensive three-month program, Garg and McCarroll are also taking independent studies classes with professors from Languages, Literatures and Cultures — Chair Lidia Radi and teaching faculty Michael Marsh-Soloway — and continuing to work with Innovation Studio director Andrew Ilnicki as they have been for over the past two years.

AnswerThis is the first company started by UR students to be selected by Y Combinator.

The program initially focuses on mentoring and assistance with building a successful business. “During that time, the goal is to try to scale your company as much as possible,” Garg said.

The AnswerThis co-founders will receive $500,000 from the accelerator in exchange for an equity stake in their company. “The accelerator then connects you with investors and makes sure that your fundraising process goes smoothly,” said Garg. The two plan to raise a few more million by the end of the program.

“We're building an AI that helps scientists and other researchers find and analyze all the most relevant literature in their field and then take that analysis and boil it into literature reviews,” said Garg, a computer science major. “We're serving a lot of academia right now and helping them make their access to literature both faster and better.”

Additionally, AnswerThis can analyze a paper and point out gaps in research, generate graphs and diagrams, and message in real time via chat.

“We help users from the very beginning to conceptualize their research and then dive deeper into it,” said McCarroll, a mathematical economics major. “While a lot of users just use our product for their preliminary research, we work with some step by step during their research journey, all the way up to editing their papers into something that's submittable.”

Some AnswerThis users have reported completing their theses in weeks, instead of months. The company has an average of 20,000 monthly users, primarily professors and doctoral students.

Early fascination with research

While still in high school, Garg worked as part of an independent research group, now called semanticClimate, that focused on open-access scientific data and text mining at the University of Cambridge. “The group was looking at how we could make literature analysis better, how to find better papers, and how to download them for bulk analysis,” Garg said.

He witnessed his mother, a researcher, spend many hours buried in papers and under constant deadline pressure. At age 16, he built software tools to make research faster and co-authored a paper on automated retrieval of scientific literature, published in the Journal of Open Source Software.

Meanwhile, McCarroll built and scaled multiple ventures before AnswerThis. When he was in high school, he co-founded Crackin’ Coffee, which shipped products from local roasters to customers in 10 countries. He also built Deep Point Lab, which sold websites and marketing services to small businesses.

At UR, Garg and McCarroll became business partners. They imagined a company that would draw from Garg’s background in literature analysis, but be accelerated with AI. The idea of AnswerThis first took root in 2023 and by the end of 2024 was a viable business.

Richmond provides early incubation of idea

“Our company was very well incubated in the Richmond community, with support from University of Richmond professors and the entrepreneurship program,” Garg said. The Richmond Innovation Fellows program gave them critical foundational knowledge about starting a company, connected them with mentors in the community, like Startup Virginia, and encouraged them to enter competitions.

In 2024, the duo competed in the RIoT Accelerator Program in Raleigh, North Carolina, and won first place. They were also selected as the top student pitch at Accelerate D.C.

From there, they were selected to pitch at the Startup World Cup, where only the top 10 percent of teams are invited. They pitched before a large audience of investors and other entrepreneurs.

“Ayush and Ryan embody the ingenuity, persistence, and critical thinking skills that define great innovators,” said Marsh-Soloway. “Their work on AnswerThis reflects not only impressive technical skill, but also a deep curiosity about how AI can serve human creativity and inquiry.”