Thomas Montfort builds AI platform to empower student innovators

Rising entrepreneur and computer science student Thomas Montfort has been awarded a Hunter’s Fund grant to advance Agora Labs, a think tank and incubator he co-founded to make artificial intelligence (AI) research more accessible to students and independent developers.

Thomas’s idea grew out of personal experience. “As a student looking to train my own AI model, I was unable to obtain the necessary compute from centralized cloud providers like AWS,” he explains. “This immediately disqualified me from doing any AI research—so I decided to build the solution myself.”

Alongside co-founders Ishan Dhanani, a master’s student at Columbia University, and Anish Madipotti, an honors student at the University of Texas at Austin, Thomas now serves as CTO of Agora Labs. The team’s mission is to remove barriers to innovation by creating a platform that provides accessible, decentralized AI tools.

“I resonate with Hunter Watson’s resilience,” Thomas says. “It fuels my commitment to overcome any obstacle.” His grant will help Agora Labs continue developing and testing its AI software for students worldwide.