Daylen
Hicks/Engineer
I'm a Computer Science student with a minor in Supply Chain Management at North Carolina A&T State University, passionate about building full-stack applications and working with AI systems. From winning hackathons and founding two companies — a B2B sports platform and an AI consulting firm — to winning 1st place and a $10K prize at the TMCF HBCU Innovation Challenge with a pitch to CSAA and Guidewire executives, I build products at the intersection of technology and community.
2x
Competition Wins
$10K
TMCF Challenge Prize
3
Companies Founded
3.6
GPA at NC A&T
AI Engineer, Founder, Builder, Hackathon Winner, TMCF Challenge Winner, LLM Engineer, Basketball Head, Product Thinker, CS Student, Full-Stack Dev, Community Builder, AI Consultant, Problem Solver
Featured
Projects
A selection of projects built at hackathons and beyond — from AI-powered platforms to surgical robot dashboards.
Scholar Shield
Pitched a scholarship protection insurance product to CSAA Insurance Group and Guidewire executives as part of Team dreamZ — winning 1st place and a $10K prize among competing HBCU teams nationwide
Iterated the pitch through multiple rounds of live coach and executive feedback, carrying it from customer discovery through a Business Model Canvas and 10-section business plan (BP10) to the final judged pitch
PitchPad
Built an AI-powered pitch practice platform as deployment & infrastructure lead; architected a Next.js/Vercel frontend and FastAPI/Railway backend serving real-time AI feedback for the Lenovo "Ideation to Impact" challenge
Integrated OpenAI Whisper for live transcription and GPT-4o to auto-generate pitch decks in under 60 seconds; used Groq for low-latency coaching scored on a 1–10 scale
Wired Supabase (PostgreSQL + pgvector + Auth) supporting 2 user roles (Creator/Reviewer) and shareable pitch deck export
I Got Next
Full-stack pickup basketball platform scaled to 500+ active players and 120 courts across 3 cities — 18 routes including a live player map, facility dashboard, admin panel, and public profiles
B2B Stripe pipeline for YMCAs and parks & rec departments with 3 facility pricing tiers ($199–$699/mo) and a $5.99/mo player Pro tier; Airtable-powered facility lead capture and CRM