Chronos
An AI-powered scheduling platform for students — founded, funded, and shipped from zero.
100+
active users
$2,000
competitive funding
<10 s
to generate a week schedule
A constraint-based AI scheduling engine that turns tasks, goals, and calendar commitments into optimized weekly schedules. Built solo as a startup through Penn State's Happy Valley LaunchBox — 100+ active users and $2,000 in competitive funding.
From interviews to engine
Chronos started with 30+ customer discovery interviews across student cohorts, which surfaced one number: 74% of students reported significant planning-related stress. The product answer is an adaptive scheduling system that accounts for energy, priority, and academic workload patterns — a niche that Notion, Clockwise, and Google Calendar don't address.
The engine treats scheduling as a constraint problem: fixed commitments, task deadlines, energy windows, and break policies go in; a conflict-free week comes out. Conflict handling is configurable (strict / warn / allow), and the recurring-event model uses a base-plus-exception design so a single edited occurrence doesn't corrupt the series.
Running it like a company
Chronos went through Penn State's Idea TestLab and MVP DevLab accelerator programs and secured $2,000 in competitive funding from Happy Valley LaunchBox. Beta testing ran with students across majors, including a collaboration agreement with a student productivity club for structured feedback.
Engineering runs like production software: GitHub Actions CI for lint, typecheck, and build; CSP and secure headers; Supabase row-level security on every table; and a Capacitor build that packages the platform for mobile with push notifications.
Highlights
- Constraint-based scheduling engine with energy- and priority-aware placement, break insertion, and conflict detection — the AI builds a full week schedule in under 10 seconds
- 35% reduction in conflicting event generation during internal testing
- Full-stack production system: React + TypeScript frontend, Supabase auth/DB/edge functions, deployed on Cloudflare Pages and Workers
- Recurring events with exception handling, undo/redo history, drag-and-drop scheduling, .ics calendar import/export, and full DST-aware timezone support
- Security hardening: CSP headers, row-level security policies, environment validation; CI/CD via GitHub Actions
- 30+ customer discovery interviews — 74% of students surveyed reported significant planning-related stress; $2,000 secured from Happy Valley LaunchBox