Cortex

Landing Page
StoryBoard
generated slides
Video Demo

Inspiration

As a team, we've spent years in the startup world, building products, judging pitches, reviewing hundreds of demos. And we've all noticed the same frustrating pattern: Great ideas fail because they're poorly communicated. Not because the tech is weak. Not because the product lacks value. But because the presentation doesn't show that value clearly.

So this weekend, we asked ourselves a simple question: “What if every builder had a fair shot at showing the world what they made, without needing to be a designer, video editor, or pitch expert?”

What it does

Slide Deck Generator Cortex turns any GitHub repo or website into a structured pitch deck. Choose from modes like investor pitch, hackathon pitch, technical walkthrough, or product overview, and get a clean, ready-to-present deck instantly.
Demo Video Generator Cortex also creates polished demo videos by automatically navigating your product, capturing the UI, and generating narration that gives you a clear, professional walkthrough with zero editing.

How we built it

Next.js frontend collects and validates inputs, then calls a serverless API that triggers an on‑demand orchestration flow. The API fetches the repo via Octokit, runs lightweight static analysis, and calls an LLM (OpenAI ) with prompt templates to produce a structured storyboard; scene embeddings are stored in a vector DB for retrieval. An on‑demand job renders scenes with a puppeteer, synthesizes narration via a TTS service, mixes audio/animations, and encodes the timed sequence with ffmpeg. A separate on‑demand job renders React-based slide templates from the storyboard and exports PDF or PPTX, with speaker notes populated from the same JSON.

Challenges we ran into

Our most crucial hurdle were the Browsercash api issues. Our scraping agent, Browsercash, was often unresponsive or inconsistent, which made extracting structured data from certain websites more difficult than expected. We also had difficulty trying to tame our video agent. we had to make sure Puppeteer reliably followed the right interactions, avoided misclicks, and produced clean, reproducible demo footage required a lot of fine-tuning and custom safeguards. Lastly getting kicked out of Rutherford by security T-T. We had to relocate multiple times while coding, which disrupted our workflow more than we'd like to admit.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We started with one goal: help builders communicate their work clearly, and we're proud that we actually delivered on that vision.
Built a full URL to pitch deck/video pipeline that turns projects into clear, professional stories in minutes.
Integrated scraping, narrative generation, and Puppeteer-driven demos into one smooth, reliable workflow.
Created multiple pitch modes so builders can tailor their story for investors, hackathons, or technical audiences.
Most importantly, we shipped a tool that solves the exact problem that inspired us: making great work understandable, accessible, and pitch-ready for everyone.

What we learned

Clear communication is as hard as the product itself, and solving that problem meaningfully takes more thought and time than we expected.
AI agents need strong guardrails to behave reliably; without them, scraping and automated demos become unpredictable.

What's next for Cortex

Deploy and stabilize the platform so anyone can paste a URL/GitHub repo and instantly receive a deck or demo video online.
Expand pitch modes and templates for investors, hackathons, accelerators, internal teams, and product onboarding.
Add more use cases for things like explaining onboarding docs thru videos, teaching educational topics, etc...
Launch our go-to-market strategy starting with hackathons, university clubs, and indie founder communities.