Her school blocked ChatGPT. Now this 17-year-old high school senior runs an AI startup with 1,000 users

Navya Tuteja is still a high school senior, but she’s already acting like a founder with a product, users, and a point of view. At Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology outside Washington, D.C., she launched Raaha two months ago. The free platform helps neurodivergent job seekers judge whether a listing actually fits before they apply. It already has more than 1,000 users and 20,000 job listings.

The idea came from home as much as from school. Tuteja said her mother is hard of hearing, and she kept noticing the same thing across job postings aimed at neurodivergent people: the listings were written almost entirely from the employer’s side. Plenty of requirements. Very little about what the workday actually feels like. Raaha turns that into a quiz and a fit score, so candidates can get a more realistic read before burning time on an application.

She built the tool herself and is keeping it free for now. The future business plan is straightforward enough: employers and workforce organizations would pay to use the platform or improve their listings. Tuteja says she still plans to go to college, but if Raaha keeps growing at its current pace, she’d consider doing it full-time.

Her school’s AI policy shaped more than her startup timing. Thomas Jefferson blocks ChatGPT, Claude and similar tools on school WiFi, and Tuteja says that made her use them far less during the day. That mattered. It forced her to do exam-related thinking on her own, and she carried that habit into the hours when the ban no longer applied and she was building a company.

Even now, she draws a line between schoolwork and everything else. She uses AI for practical tasks like drafting emails or making sense of messy information, and she used it for more mechanical parts of Raaha, mainly cleaning up the website design. But she keeps schoolwork clean. That puts her at odds with a lot of students: RAND found regular AI use for homework rose from 48% to 62% between May and December 2025, and a Science study of more than 95,000 undergraduates found daily users were nearly four times as likely as monthly users to say they’d used it to cheat.

Tuteja is also not shy about the bigger policy fight. She says she thinks AI should be more regulated, but she doesn’t think school bans are the answer. That’s a pretty clean read on where this is headed: the kids who are learning to use AI carefully will end up setting the tone, while everyone else keeps pretending a WiFi block is a strategy.