Blake Jaronko, a Wake Forest’s Class of 2025 alumnus and CEO of Zibt app, is not a morning person. He even missed the opportunity to pitch his alarm-optimization startup idea during junior year because, ironically, his alarm didn’t go off for the morning class.
That experience wasn’t his first exposure to the pain point of the morning rush that millions of commuters face every single day. After spending hours stuck in tourist traffic on the Jersey Shore during summer breaks, Jaronko started brainstorming a solution to his “migraine headache problem” of running late due to traffic. He imagined an around-the-clock personal assistant that could plan out his commute while he slept and wake him at the perfect time in the morning.
The idea has since grown into Zibt — a mobile app designed to help people plan each leg of their commute. After users input data like their place of origin, planned stops and desired time of arrival to the final destination, Zibt takes care of the rest. The alarm feature wakes up users at the optimal time, accounting for real-time traffic and weather, personal preferences and even historical data like average wait times at a user’s go-to coffee shop.
“Most people set their alarm for the same time every morning,” Jaronko said. “But you never actually get to work at the same time every day because of weather, traffic and other external factors.”
The startup, first developed with the help of Wake Forest’s Center for Entrepreneurship, plans to generate revenue by selling brand partnerships — like suggesting a Starbucks stop if a commuter has extra time in the morning — and offering a premium subscription to seasoned commuters.
“It would be somewhat of a B2C2B (business-to-consumer-to-business) model in which we sell our user base numbers to companies for targeted ads,” Co-founder and COO of Zibt, Natalia Correa, said.
From pitch to product
After validating the idea in Deacon Springboard by getting feedback from potential customers, Zibt successfully transformed from a rough concept to a full-fledged venture in Startup Lab, Wake Forest’s startup accelerator that has launched some of the school’s star entrepreneurs like Storage Scholars and Nori.
Jaronko didn’t do it alone. He recruited his Class of 2025 classmate, Natalia Correa, as an Operations Lead, and childhood friends Max Nickell and Tomas Zolofra to lead software development and Zibt’s go-to-market strategy, respectively. But the co-founders have another promising business partner working around the clock: AI.
Off-the-shelf AI tools like Cursor and Gemini, which are readily available to the public and require no proprietary element, have been core to Zibt’s product development since the company’s beginning. The app has roughly 80,000 lines of code, most of which were written or refined with the help of AI.
Experts have argued that integrating AI into early-stage tech startups has now become essential, not just advantageous, to build a competitive business. While having a chatbot or AI assistant to write code used to be a luxury reserved for the most highly funded tech founders, the tools have become so accessible that anyone can build a viable product with AI.
“I’ve had students go from an idea in the morning to having a working demo by the evening just by utilizing AI,” Director of Startup Lab Gregory Pool said. “Four years ago, I would ask students, ‘Are you a developer or a coder?’ but now the question is simply ‘Can you use Cursor?’”
Winning the Automation Game
Beyond using AI to build software, consumer preferences are changing so that AI is increasingly integrated into the customer-facing side of the business model.
“It’s true that AI can help you create the app itself, but we have also reached a point where AI should be integrated into the experience of the app,” Pool said. “We, as consumers, now expect our products to know what we want before we want them ourselves.”
Accordingly, Zibt’s technical team is also training its own models. Jaronko envisions the Zibt experience beyond just automating the morning commute, but evolving into a product analogous to an AI agent by building integrations with Outlook or Gmail, for instance.
“We eventually want Zibt to be a complete AI executive assistant and would have access to your calendar,” Jaronko said. “The app would know when and where you have meetings and send push notifications throughout the day to keep you on schedule.”
Jack Weissenberger (‘19), the co-founder and CTO of a generative-AI consultancy platform called Ciridae that helps businesses strategically integrate AI into their workflows, says building a product with AI is only part of the battle. Execution still requires human experts to address problems like integrating security measures and ensuring the product runs reliably after launch.
“It’s easy to hit that first 80% when building a startup because of AI tools, but most of the value comes from the execution in that final 20%,” Weissenberger said. “Anyone can spin up a Lovable website really quickly but ‘can you get it deployed when you need Role Based Access Control?’ or ‘can you scale up the website when it is getting too much traffic?’”
Fundraising in a Competitive Environment
It’s not just consumers who are looking for smarter products. Roughly 70% of the most recent batch of companies coming out of Y Combinator, one of the world’s most influential startup accelerators, include AI in their title or search description. While investors are moving towards a preference for AI products and apps, increased market competition will require unique products and founding teams.
“VCs are aware that it has become fairly easy to spin up a flashy demo very quickly,” Weissenberger said. “So they are looking for more outside differentiation that can’t be replicated like a network effect, a unique business insight or maybe even someone on the team, like a doctor, lawyer or college student, that can sell to a specific market.”
Some entrepreneurs are even using AI for the fundraising process itself. Audos is an AI-powered startup incubator that provides founders with seed capital, so long as they hand over 15% of yearly revenue once the business becomes profitable. While the typical fundraising process requires a developed founding team to pitch to venture capitalists in exchange for equity, AI has made it possible for solo founders to scale on their own.
What’s Next for Zibt?
Jaronko and his team are working on the business full-time while raising capital and polishing the user experience. Their next goal is to expand their travel optimization processes beyond morning commutes. Zibt’s next version will integrate Transportation Security Administration wait times of major U.S. airports to alleviate flyers of the mental burden of planning their travel days.
While the target user is currently business executives and frequent travelers, Jaronko sees other opportunities in marketing the app to working parents who are juggling morning routines, kids’ practice schedules and busy evenings.
“We are very proud of our product that’s on the app store right now but I think there’s so much potential to build even better and become a product that people rely on every single day,” Jaronko said.
