The Institution of Mechanical Engineers hosts the Formula Student event at the iconic Silverstone race track. Formula Student is Europe's most established educational engineering competition, held every year. The competition aims to develop enterprising and innovative young engineers and encourage more young people to pursue a career in engineering. I had the privilege of volunteering as an AI Judge, evaluating the research conducted by university teams into the application of AI in Formula race cars.

In this piece, I share some hard-earned lessons from building CoVent, an AI-powered marketplace for event sponsorships. From navigating the early challenges of product-market fit to understanding the cautious nature of the UK startup ecosystem, this is a look at what’s worked for us and what I wish I’d known when starting.

Krishna Dubba, Co-founder and CTO of CoVent, is leveraging multi-agent systems, large language models, and open-source tools to build an adaptive AI-driven marketplace for event sponsorships. His lean, cutting-edge approach enables scalable data extraction and automation without relying on traditional infrastructure, positioning CoVent to compete with larger players through agility and innovation.