She made note of a problem—and devised a solution

Manvi Kottakota is busy. From the moment the Northeastern University student wakes up in the morning to the moment she closes her eyes at night, there are meetings to run, classes to attend, friends to coordinate with, homework to complete, clubs and sports to participate in.

Kottakota is a data science student in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences. She spent her first semester abroad, at Northeastern University London, where she quickly established herself as a passionate thinker (and doer). There, she co-founded Northeastern’s Young Entrepreneurs, the first entrepreneurship club on the London campus. She and the members of her executive board brought in local businesspeople and investors, and hosted events to draw together like-minded peers.

When she joined Northeastern’s Boston campus, she quickly became a mainstay at Entrepreneurs Club meetings and events and rose up its ranks. She was associate director of the club’s signature event, the Husky Startup Challenge; co-vice president of the Entrepreneurs Club, and then co-president of the club; all within two years. Separately, she served as the director of outreach for Northeastern’s DATA Club, a student organization for all things data.

Even before then, Kottakota was industrious. At her high school in Cupertino, California, (home of Apple, Google, and other entrepreneurial success stories) Kottakota ran a swift business selling her homemade jewelry.

“It was a hobby that turned into a business type of thing, and that was a really good experience,” she says. “I ran that business for about a year or so, and I think I knew by the end of it that entrepreneurship was something I was passionate about.”

She also, for what it’s worth, helped run a venture accelerator in high school—an extracurricular activity uniquely suited to Silicon Valley.

But back to Northeastern. In early 2023, Kottakota was part of a team organizing a startup hackathon for the Entrepreneurs Club, when she had an idea: Why just organize the hackathon? Why not build something and participate?

“So we literally were just brainstorming needs in our lives, places where we found a gap or an unmet need,” Kottakota recalls of her collaborator, Frank Isaacson, a Northeastern student and Entrepreneurs Club member. “And that’s where we came up with Jot.”

Jot: An intuitive note taking platform that leverages AI and machine learning for seamless organization and effortless retrieval and collaboration.

“The idea is that there are so many productivity tool platforms, and we wanted to make the process overall more seamless,” she says.

Every time Kottakota was in a meeting, or class, or working on a project, or even just making plans with friends, she’d jot down notes. But these quickly became ungainly: class notes mixed with social plans, mixed with entrepreneurial musings. And more importantly for a time-strapped student, Kottakota had no way of efficiently organizing and retrieving these notes when she needed them. Jot is designed to solve all these issues.

Kottakota was recognized among this year’s Northeastern University Women Who Empower Innovator Awards. The annual awards honor entrepreneurs for their innovative, boundary-pushing work. This year’s recipients—students and alumni from the Northeastern community—were selected by a panel of judges and will receive a total of $500,000 in funding. Kottakota was honored among undergraduate student award winners.

If the market is any indication, Kottakota and her team are onto something. According to estimates from industry organizations, note-taking apps are currently a half-billion-dollar market, one poised to grow to more than $2 billion in the next decade. The widespread adoption of remote work and learning since the COVID-19 pandemic has created a need for teams to take down and share notes easily, oftentimes across states and time zones. In short, as pen and paper became less useful collaboration tools, digital note-taking platforms have risen to prominence.

Kottakota and her team are still playing out with the best way to deploy Jot—does it make more sense as a plugin for existing notetaking platforms? Is it best as a standalone app?

“We do eventually want to roll out an application, because I think the main value-add of being on Jot is that it makes the process of taking notes much better,” Kottakota says. “The fact that you can leverage machine learning to organize your notes and help you more smartly navigate where to find things is huge—and something that really can only be fully done in an application.”

As for Kottakota herself, while she’ll continue building Jot, she’s also looking forward to savoring the final two years of her undergraduate career.

“But something I want to prioritize going forward is just slowing down. Even though I’ve been putting myself in all these great places, around these great people, I also want to just try absorbing it all,” she says. “I want to take time for myself to actually build and work on the things that I’m passionate about, and I think that’s what starting Jot was all about. It was taking time away from the rush of everything and the busyness of everything, and just working on something that interested me and challenged me as well.”