Agents are a knowledge-scoping mechanism
The five agents are not personas over one model — they are five retrieval boundaries, which is what makes their answers differ meaningfully.
A multi-agent platform that splits founder support into five specialist roles, each with its own knowledge boundary, because a single general assistant gives generically useful answers to specific problems.
Interface
What the user touches
Application
Where the rules run
Intelligence
Models and ingestion
Data
What persists
Platform
What it runs on
Founders ask a wide range of questions, but they ask them from inside a specific role at a specific moment: a pricing question is not a legal question, and neither is answered well by the same context window.
The prevailing pattern was one assistant with one prompt and one undifferentiated knowledge base. It produces answers that are plausible everywhere and authoritative nowhere.
North Road AI was built to test the opposite structure — five specialists with separate remits and separate access to knowledge, so that a financial document informs the finance agent and not the marketing one.
A single assistant that knows everything answers every question at the same depth. Founders do not need average depth — they need the right depth in one area at a time.
A Next.js 16 platform on Firebase where five specialist agents share a RAG pipeline but not a knowledge scope, wrapped in founder tooling, a mentor portal, and Stripe-ready monetisation.
Five specialist agents
Navigator (strategy and operations), Builder (product and engineering), Ledger (finance), Counsel (legal and compliance), and Rainmaker (sales and marketing).
Scoped knowledge access
Admins assign documents to specific agents, so financial reports reach Ledger without leaking into every other conversation.
RAG over mixed sources
Retrieval across uploaded PDFs and text, scraped websites, and ingested Hugging Face datasets.
Startup DNA profile
Structured tracking of burn rate, runway, stage, and key metrics that agents can reason against.
Mentorship portal
A dedicated mentor dashboard for overseeing and guiding founder progress.
Founder Score and leaderboards
Gamification that gives progress a visible shape across a long and unstructured journey.
One assistant with one knowledge base answers narrow questions with broad context, which reads as confident and vague.
Not all founder documents should inform all conversations — knowledge scope is a correctness requirement, not a permissions nicety.
RAG quality depends almost entirely on ingestion, which is the least glamorous part of the system.
Founder progress is long, non-linear, and easy to lose track of without some external structure.
Mentors need a different view of the same data than the founders they are guiding.
The core architectural bet is that specialisation with bounded knowledge beats generality with a larger context window.
The five agents are not personas over one model — they are five retrieval boundaries, which is what makes their answers differ meaningfully.
Document upload, web scraping, and dataset ingestion got first-class admin tooling because retrieval quality is capped by what got indexed.
Startup DNA holds burn, runway, and stage as data the agents can read, rather than hoping it surfaces in chat history.
Firestore was chosen so mentor and founder views of the same engagement stay consistent without polling.
Each agent owns a domain and sees only the documents assigned to it, which is what makes the specialisation real rather than cosmetic.
Uploads, scraping, and dataset ingestion are admin-grade tooling, because retrieval is only as good as the index behind it.
Startup DNA, Founder Score, and the mentor portal turn an unstructured multi-year path into something that can be reviewed.
Phase 1
Define the five agent domains, build retrieval on Firestore, and establish per-agent knowledge scoping.
Phase 2
Ship document upload, the web scraper, Hugging Face dataset ingestion, and the assignment interface.
Phase 3
Layer Startup DNA, chat persistence, the mentor dashboard, gamification, and Stripe-based monetisation.
North Road AI is one of the ventures we design, build, and run in-house at AshaVid.