Our second Bondi AI Collective event was again at capacity, bringing together talented AI builders and entrepreneurs from Bondi region and beyond.
The event featured insights from the founders of two exceptional Bondi-based businesses:
Scott David of Shapeable, a global AI-powered platform for collaboration on major systemic challenges.
Tom Kaldor of Ajust, a service to assist Australians to get responses to complaints from major companies.
Below are distilled insights from the event.
Attendee introductions (incomplete)
- Steffen: Management consultant building AI apps
- Conor: Founder of MyMoneyMedic.ai, offering financial guidance; background as a CFO, formerly at EY Dublin and major banks.
- Tom Kaldor: Founder of Ajust, former lawyer, previously built legal tech products.
- Vish: Early-stage startup founder exploring AI UX audits, potentially pivoting.
- Fred Samson: Enthusiast in general technology and AI systems.
- Salah: Growth marketer connecting AI-trained virtual assistants with Australian startups.
- Lance: Growth lead at Ajust, previously built startups in New York and San Francisco.
- Lou: Works occasionally with Ross Dawson and Bondi Innovation, background in startups, operations, marketing, and European ecosystems.
- Unnamed Participant: Background in software and design, helps entrepreneurs build MVPs, POCs, and AI automations, personally developing an AI learning application called RGB.
- Kunal: Entrepreneur and investor new to Bondi, highly engaged with AI-related ideas affecting his sleep.
- Scott David: Founder of Shapeable, previously led digital tech innovation at the World Economic Forum, focusing on community acceleration.
2. Scott David’s Presentation on Shapeable
Scott David described Shapeable as a collaborative platform that facilitates networks of organizations working together to solve significant social, industry, and environmental issues. Examples include kelp reforestation projects, suicide decriminalization advocacy, and fostering sustainability innovation within global communities.
The AI architecture of Shapeable features a clear separation between platform and AI servers to ensure flexibility in development. It utilizes Node.js and GraphQL initially, transitioning to Express to better handle streaming needs. Pinecone is employed as the vector database for semantic search capabilities within a retrieval-augmented generation framework. MongoDB manages the entity relationship structures critical for accurate knowledge graphing.
Scott also highlighted the integration of LangChain, ensuring compatibility and flexibility across various foundation AI models like OpenAI, Claude, or DeepSeek. The platform emphasizes compliance and data privacy through geographically dispersed, securely managed server environments using Azure, Heroku, Netlify, Terraform, and Docker.
Looking ahead, Shapeable is exploring agentic capabilities, enabling proactive and personalized AI-driven interactions. Privacy and confidentiality are meticulously handled through a detailed tagging system determining data accessibility levels for each user group.
3. Tom Kaldor’s Presentation on Ajust
Tom Kaldor presented Ajust as a consumer-centric platform that transforms how customer support and complaints are managed, positioning itself as a unified entry point for consumers to resolve issues across a variety of businesses without direct commercial arrangements with those companies.
Ajust leverages AI to simplify complaint resolution. It dynamically generates targeted questions tailored to specific consumer issues, streamlining the complaint submission process. This allows consumers to efficiently articulate problems and seek resolutions without navigating complicated business-centric support channels.
The platform is experimenting with monetization through premium services, charging a small fee for managing complaint cases on behalf of users. Additionally, Ajust considers employing AI-generated social media advocacy tools as leverage, incentivizing businesses to respond quickly to consumer complaints by increasing public visibility of unresolved issues.
Looking forward, Ajust aims to expand into proactive support through AI-driven “agentic” functionalities, shifting from merely reactive complaint handling towards anticipating and addressing potential consumer issues proactively. Although investors have recommended exploring a business-to-business approach, Ajust remains committed to its consumer-first strategy, potentially integrating directly with businesses in the future once substantial consumer adoption is achieved.
