Hilda

Georgetown University, McDonough School of Business

Industry: Software / Home Care

MBA Founding Student Name(s): Andres Brillembourg

Brief Description of Solution: Hilda is an AI recruiter that lets home care agencies hire 10x faster by reviewing applications, engaging candidates, and booking interviews in minutes – not days or weeks.

Funding Dollars: $35K

What led you to launch this venture? My wife’s grandpa, Echi, struggled for years to find reliable home care. I didn’t understand why, so I looked into it and what I found shocked me. The home care industry turns away 1 in 4 new patient referrals each month due to staffing shortages. Agencies are desperate for more caregivers, but they’re way too slow at recruiting. The #1 reason is manual and inefficient workflows. That’s where Hilda comes in. We automate agencies’ recruiting workflows using AI to help them hire faster, so patients like Echi can get the care they need.

What has been your biggest accomplishment so far with venture? We recently completed our first successful pilots – collaborating with our design patterns to test and iterate our core product features.

What has been the most significant challenge you’ve faced in creating your company and how did you solve it? Early on, we had trouble figuring out the right product features to build or how to build them. So, instead of writing code, we decided to embed ourselves inside our customers’ organizations as makeshift recruiters. We essentially became the MVP, executing the workflows ourselves that we would eventually automate with software. This decision proved crucial in allowing us to design a product that would not only address our customers’ needs but also be easy to adopt.

How has your MBA program helped you further this startup venture? Georgetown’s entrepreneurship course, Startup Factory, gave me the tools and frameworks to explore startup ideas. The MBA Startup Fellowship gave me the money to forego a summer internship and spend two months doing customer discovery. The Leonsis Venture Lab gave me an office space to work out of and a community of equally passionate founders to lean on for support. And lastly, Bark Tank gave me the starting capital to hire our founding engineer and launch Hilda.

Which MBA class has been most valuable in building your startup and what was the biggest lesson you gained from it? Startup Factory was the most valuable. We had five days to validate a startup idea. It taught me to test the market and iterate quickly, a fundamental principle in the search for product-market fit.

What professor made a significant contribution to your plans and why? Professor Arun Gupta. He encourages students to take the path less traveled – to take risks and follow their passion, rather than settling for what’s comfortable or safe.

How has your local startup ecosystem contributed to your venture’s development and success?
The Washington, D.C. startup ecosystem has introduced me to like-minded founders who have provided key insights that have helped Hilda navigate both technical and operational challenges.

What is your long-term goal with your startup? Our long-term goal is to build an end-to-end workforce platform for the home care industry that streamlines HR, freeing agencies to spend more time on what matters most: patient care.

Looking back, what is the biggest lesson you wished you’d known before launching and scaling your venture? Think less, do more. Entrepreneurship is like being at sea or in the jungle with no map. You’re faced with millions of little forks in the road, constantly, on a daily basis, but you never have enough information to predict with certainty which way is right. So, you have two choices. First, you can sit there and deliberate for days on end what direction to take. Otherwise, you can just take one, see where it leads you, and if you hit a dead end then retrace your steps and try the other way. Nine times out of ten, you’re better off choosing the latter. Trial-and-error tends to get you to the right answer much faster than analysis. That’s what makes entrepreneurship so different to most other professions – it rewards taking shots in the dark.

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