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ProofPack — business model, impact and operations

Written for the Build with Gemini XPRIZE submission (August 2026). Numbers marked "measured" come from the committed runs in output/; everything else is a stated hypothesis to be tested in pilots.

The one-paragraph pitch

Every US state runs Medicaid "self-direction" programs where a person with a disability controls their own service budget. Before that budget can pay for a community class, a membership or a household item, an agency reviewer must prove the purchase is publicly available at a published price — by visiting the provider's website and saving date-stamped screenshots for the audit file. It is slow, manual, and inconsistent, and a mistake means the agency repays the money. ProofPack is an AI agent that does that research and produces an audit-grade evidence package in minutes, for cents, while a human keeps the approve/deny decision.

Category: Professional Services Access

Compliance review is professional-services labor that small human-services non-profits can't staff at the level the audits demand. ProofPack makes reviewer-grade verification available per application, on demand, at a price a five-person agency can afford — the same way payroll or e-signature software made once-specialist work routine.

Customer, value, model

Who buys Fiscal Intermediaries (FIs) and support-brokerage agencies that administer self-directed budgets. New York alone has dozens of FIs serving ~30,000 self-directing participants; nationally, Medicaid HCBS self-direction covers well over a million people across nearly every state (Applied Self-Direction / NCI figures).
Who uses The pre-approvals reviewer (5–50 per agency).
Value created Reviewer time: 20–40 minutes of manual browsing and screenshotting → ~3 minutes of reading a finished report. Consistency: every reviewer gets the same checklist applied the same way. Audit defence: every "Found" carries a stamped, hashed capture.
Pricing (hypothesis) $3 per reviewed application (usage-based, no seat minimum) or $149 per reviewer seat / month for high-volume agencies. Both are 15–100× the measured model cost, leaving room for hosting, support and a browser-capture service.
Cost to serve Measured $0.02–$0.19 of Gemini per review (seven committed runs); browser compute is negligible; the marginal cost of a review is well under $0.50 all-in.
B2B / B2C B2B, sold to agencies. Participants and providers never pay.
Acquisition Pilot-first: 20 anonymized forms reviewed free, agency grades the packages against their own reviewer's work. Channels: state FI associations, self-direction conferences, and the brokers/care managers who submit the forms and feel the delay.
Retention The evidence package becomes part of the agency's audit file — once the auditors have seen it, going back to manual screenshots is a step down. Per-agency checklists (YAML) and caps make the product sticky without lock-in.

Impact — how we measure it

Theory of change: if reviewers stop spending their time gathering evidence, approvals get faster and more defensible, participants get access to their own budgets sooner, and small agencies can take on more self-directing participants without hiring.

Output (we count) Outcome (we expect) Evidence
Applications reviewed; % of website items evidenced automatically (target ≥ 70%; committed runs: 25 of 30 website items concluded, 5 honest Not-Found/Needs-Review) Reviewer minutes per application: 20–40 → < 5 Pilot time studies; the tool's own run.log and cost lines
Fabricated findings (target: zero, enforced by code) Audit findings avoided; agency clawbacks avoided Package integrity audit (tests/test_audit_packages.py); pilot audit outcomes
Days from submission to decision Faster access for participants to classes, memberships, equipment Agency queue data before/after
Cost per review Agencies serve more participants per reviewer Billing data

Hypotheses to prove in pilots: (1) reviewers accept ≥ 90% of agent findings without change (we log every override in chat mode, so acceptance is measurable); (2) turnaround drops by half; (3) at least one agency's auditor accepts the package format as the audit record.

AI-native operations — what the AI decides, and what it doesn't

ProofPack is not a chatbot bolted onto a form. Gemini runs the operation:

  • Reads every application (Gemini PDF understanding with a JSON schema) — decides the category, the requested item, the fees, every YES/NO answer.
  • Runs the investigation — the agent chooses which pages to open, what to read, what to search for, what to capture, and whether each requirement is met (found / not_found / needs_review), then writes the reviewer summary. Roughly 20–40 model decisions per review, each logged.
  • Handles the reviewer's follow-ups in plain language (chat mode: change a status, add a note, re-run the check).

What the AI is not allowed to do is decided in code: it cannot record a "Found" without a capture that exists, cannot quote text that wasn't on a page it visited, cannot write a timestamp or a hash, and never sees the internal-only questions. That split — model decides, Python enforces — is the reason the output can go into a Medicaid audit file.

Evidence of AI in production: every committed package in output/ contains run.log (the agent's decision trail), report.json (model id, token usage, cost) and hashed captures; the Google Cloud console for the project shows the Generative Language API traffic behind them.

Google Cloud usage

  • Gemini API (gemini-3.7-flash) via a Google AI Studio key on a billed Google Cloud project — three call sites: form extraction, the browsing agent, reviewer chat.
  • Roadmap: the reviewer workbench (verify.py serve) runs locally today; hosting it behind authentication on Cloud Run is the next step, with the Google Drive API for a watched-folder intake, because a shared Drive folder is how FI staff already move forms.

Revenue, expenses, users (hackathon period, May 19 – Aug 17 2026)

  • Revenue: $0 (May $0 · June $0 · July $0 · August $0). Related-party revenue: $0.
  • Users: 0 external users; 0 paying. The product was built and validated in the period; the first pilot conversations start after submission.
  • Expenses: Gemini API usage only (a few dollars for development and the committed runs) — 100% COGS. Marketing/sales: $0. R&D: founder time, unpaid. G&A: $0.

Sustaining operations

  • Resources: one founder-engineer; the product runs on pay-as-you-go Gemini + a small Cloud Run footprint, so fixed costs are near zero until pilots convert.
  • Threats: provider websites that block automated browsers (mitigation: headed capture service / licensed product-data APIs); PHI handling requirements (mitigation: redact participant identity before any API call, paid-tier no-training terms, retention rules); model changes (mitigation: pinned model id + the golden sample set as a regression suite).
  • After the hackathon: ship the watched-folder intake, run three free pilots with NY FIs, convert one to paid, then use per-agency YAML checklists to expand to other states' forms.

Five-year view (hypothesis)

Serviceable market: ~1,500 agencies administering self-directed budgets in the US, averaging a few thousand pre-approval decisions a year → roughly 5–10 million reviewable applications a year, i.e. a $15–30M/yr opportunity at $3 per review before adjacent workflows (invoice verification, provider re-verification, appeals). Path to profitability: gross margin > 85% at the measured cost to serve; break-even at ~30 paying agencies on seat pricing, which is a single-state footprint.

Pilot offer

Send 20 anonymized, completed pre-approval forms (participant names removed). We return the review packages within two business days. Your reviewer grades them; if the packages don't save real time or find something your reviewer would have missed, you owe nothing and keep the packages.