Neil Kumar frequently forgets water bottles or jackets at school or the gym, making him one of millions of Americans whose misplaced belongings end up in lost-and-found boxes or landfills annually.
Now Kumar has founded FindIt, an application designed to provide an artificial intelligence solution for recovering lost possessions.
The 15-year-old Bellevue High School freshman was recently chosen as one of four innovators participating in the city’s Civic Innovation Challenge, an initiative identifying technology solutions for municipal problems.
FindIt will operate on a trial basis at Bellevue College to evaluate the app’s functionality and effectiveness among students, staff and visitors, assessing its potential for wider implementation.
“I’ve always been interested in how technology can solve our real world problems,” Kumar explained.
Statistics indicate over 400 million items are lost and found annually in the United States. Lost items’ estimated value exceeds $5 billion per year.
Kumar wants his invention to address both the economic impact of these losses and sustainability concerns. His tagline reads “Buy less, lose even less.”
Available on iOS, FindIt operates when someone managing a lost-and-found system at a school, for instance, photographs a recovered item and uploads the image. Artificial intelligence processes the photograph, generating descriptions like “blue water bottle with red sticker and white top.”
Students seeking lost items type descriptions into FindIt, and the app’s AI searches uploaded listings identifying the best matches.
Kumar explained that mobile app searching proves superior to traditional systems requiring people to physically return to locations where they may have left belongings.
He began developing the project one year ago, and FindIt competed among 23 applicants reviewed in the civic challenge. Three other accepted companies and concepts include:
Certivo, a Seattle company offering an AI-driven platform providing vendor compliance visibility across procurement and cybersecurity.
Legislaide, a Denver company employing AI to analyze municipal codes, legislative history and state statutes, enabling staff to conduct plain English searches across agendas, minutes, ordinances, resolutions, reports and additional documents.
Juganu, an Israeli company providing smart lighting solutions illuminating curbside activity while monitoring real-time usage patterns supporting city and Bellevue College transportation and public safety initiatives.
FindIt also gained selection for the Thermo Fisher Junior Innovators Challenge, and Kumar received recognition among the top 300 junior innovators in the United States this year.
The app currently operates at Odle Middle School in Bellevue. Kumar envisions eventually expanding the tool to additional schools plus airports, workplaces, public transit agencies and other locations.
Kumar, who participated in Sustainability Ambassadors, a program developing student leadership abilities, considers FindIt merely the beginning, expressing interest in future entrepreneurship.
“I like to solve problems using technology, and help people using those solutions,” he stated.
The personal frustration origin where Kumar’s own forgetfulness sparked the innovation demonstrates how authentic problem experience often generates the most practical solutions, with entrepreneurs who personally encounter pain points developing deeper understanding of user needs than developers theoretically addressing issues they’ve never experienced firsthand.
The 15-year-old founder’s age highlighting youth entrepreneurship acceleration in the technology sector, with high school students increasingly possessing the technical skills, business knowledge, and confidence to launch functional startups that previous generations might not have attempted until college or post-graduation years.
The Bellevue High School environment contributing to Kumar’s entrepreneurial development, with the Eastside community’s technology industry concentration creating ecosystem where students regularly interact with tech professionals, access coding education, and receive encouragement for innovation projects that normalize teenage entrepreneurship.
The Civic Innovation Challenge selection from 23 applicants validating FindIt’s merit, with municipal officials choosing Kumar’s student project alongside established companies demonstrating that the application addressed genuine civic needs rather than representing merely impressive student science fair project lacking real-world utility.
The Bellevue College pilot deployment providing controlled testing environment, with the higher education setting offering diverse user population including traditional students, continuing education enrollees, faculty, staff, and campus visitors creating varied use cases that will reveal whether FindIt functions across different demographics and usage patterns.
The technology-solving-real-world-problems philosophy articulating Kumar’s innovation approach, with the practical orientation prioritizing functional solutions over theoretical research distinguishing applied entrepreneurship from academic computer science where elegant algorithms sometimes matter more than user impact.
The 400 million lost items annually quantifying the problem’s massive scale, with the figure translating to approximately 1.2 items lost per American per year demonstrating that forgetfulness represents universal human experience creating broad market opportunity rather than niche problem affecting small user segment.
The $5 billion annual lost item value representing substantial economic waste, with the multi-billion dollar figure excluding intangible costs including time spent searching, emotional distress from losing sentimental items, and environmental impact from replacement purchases increasing consumption beyond what sustainable living requires.
The “Buy less, lose even less” tagline framing lost items as sustainability issue, with Kumar connecting personal forgetfulness to broader environmental concerns about overconsumption and waste, though the linkage assumes that unreturned lost items eventually reach landfills rather than being repurposed, donated, or retained by finders.
The iOS-only availability indicating development platform choice, with the Apple ecosystem focus potentially reflecting Kumar’s familiarity with Swift programming, strategic targeting of iPhone-dominant student demographics, or resource constraints preventing simultaneous Android development that would broaden potential user base beyond iOS device owners.
The photograph upload triggering AI processing demonstrating computer vision implementation, with the image recognition technology identifying objects, colors, text, and distinctive features generating searchable text descriptions that enable matching between found items and searcher queries without requiring manual description entry by busy lost-and-found administrators.
The “blue water bottle with red sticker and white top” example illustrating description granularity, with the detailed characterization demonstrating that FindIt’s AI doesn’t simply identify broad categories like “water bottle” but recognizes specific attributes including color, decorative elements, and component parts enabling precise differentiation between similar items.
The natural language search interface lowering barriers to use, with students describing missing items in everyday terms rather than navigating category hierarchies or using specific keywords that traditional database systems often require, making the app accessible to users lacking technical sophistication or database search experience.
The AI matching algorithm representing FindIt’s core innovation, with the system comparing user text descriptions against AI-generated item descriptions identifying probable matches solving the fundamental lost-and-found challenge of connecting owners with belongings when physical inspection proves impractical due to time, distance, or collection size.
The mobile app convenience eliminating physical return visit friction, with remote searching allowing people to verify whether their lost items have been turned in before making potentially wasted trips to check lost-and-found boxes, saving time while increasing recovery likelihood by alerting owners immediately when matches appear.
The one-year development timeline demonstrating sustained commitment, with the twelve-month period from conception to deployment indicating serious entrepreneurial effort involving planning, coding, testing, iterating, and deploying rather than weekend hackathon prototype that students sometimes create for competition credit without continuing development.
The Certivo vendor compliance platform representing enterprise software sophistication, with the Seattle company’s AI-driven procurement and cybersecurity monitoring addressing complex organizational needs that differ fundamentally from FindIt’s consumer-facing simplicity, yet both applications leverage AI for information management and pattern recognition tasks.
The Legislaide municipal code analysis addressing government efficiency through natural language processing, with the Denver company’s plain English search capability enabling city staff to navigate complex legal frameworks that conventional keyword searching handles poorly, demonstrating another application where AI excels at connecting queries with relevant information buried in large document collections.
The Juganu smart lighting combining infrastructure with data collection, with the Israeli company’s curbside monitoring supporting both practical illumination needs and usage analytics informing transportation and safety decisions, showing how modern civic infrastructure increasingly integrates sensing and analysis capabilities beyond traditional single-purpose systems.
The Thermo Fisher Junior Innovators Challenge recognition providing external validation beyond Bellevue, with the science education organization’s top 300 placement demonstrating that national evaluators recognized Kumar’s potential alongside the local civic challenge judges who selected FindIt for pilot deployment.
The Odle Middle School deployment creating operational proof point, with the Bellevue school’s adoption demonstrating that FindIt functions in actual educational environments managing real lost-and-found collections rather than remaining theoretical prototype, though single-school implementation leaves scalability questions about performance with larger item volumes.
The expansion vision encompassing airports, workplaces, and transit agencies demonstrating market understanding beyond initial school focus, with Kumar recognizing that lost-and-found challenges exist across numerous environments where people temporarily occupy spaces including terminals, offices, buses, and trains creating diverse revenue opportunities if FindIt proves successful.
The Sustainability Ambassadors participation providing leadership development, with the program offering skills in communication, project management, and systems thinking complementing Kumar’s technical abilities, enabling him to not merely build technology but effectively promote, deploy, and scale innovations requiring both engineering and business capabilities.
The future entrepreneurship aspiration indicating Kumar views FindIt as launching pad rather than singular achievement, with his stated interest in continued technology-based problem solving suggesting he’ll pursue additional ventures addressing other everyday frustrations he encounters, potentially building entrepreneurial career spanning multiple startups.
The problem-solving and helping philosophy revealing values-driven motivation, with Kumar’s emphasis on practical benefit to users rather than pure technical achievement or profit maximization reflecting purpose-oriented entrepreneurship increasingly common among younger generations prioritizing social impact alongside commercial success in their career choices.
