Karthick Arun · Founder of Setu Labs
World's youngest AWS-certified at 9. Today I build voice AI for the blind.
AWS turned me away from its Cloud Practitioner exam for being too young, so my dad and I emailed Andy Jassy. AWS made an exception, later dropped its age limit, and invited me to re:Invent. After teaching other kids cloud computing over Zoom, I founded Setu Labs to build Lucky, a digital guide dog that reads PDFs, email, and the web aloud.
Right now
Senior at Basha High School in Gilbert, Arizona
Founder & CEO, Setu Labs
Building Lucky, a voice AI for blind people, with Foundation Fighting Blindness chapters
AP Research: AI fraud detection
Fine-tuned a 20B open-weight model that beat GPT-5 on fraud detection across seven domains: 0.78 F1 vs. 0.65, and 16× faster
President, Basha DevOps Coding Club
Teaching younger students to code, something I started in 2020
Selected work
A company I founded, research I ran, and an app that earned congressional recognition.
Now building · Setu Labs
Lucky, a digital guide dog for the web
A family member lost their vision, and I saw how much their screen reader couldn't read. So at Setu Labs, I built Lucky: you talk, and it reads PDFs, email, and the web back to you in the right order. I've now presented it to 300 blind users at Foundation Fighting Blindness — their feedback shapes every release.
- ~300
- blind users saw it at a Foundation Fighting Blindness chapter; their feedback added voice and speed controls
- VISIONS 2026
- exhibited at the Foundation Fighting Blindness conference, alongside the chapters that test it
- ~25 Lambdas
- AWS pipeline that recovers reading order from PDFs while the browser keeps the user's login
Research · AP Research
A small model beat GPT-5 at catching fraud
I fine-tuned two open-weight models on seven fraud domains. My hypothesis was wrong: the smallest model won, with 0.78 F1 vs. 0.65 for GPT-5, and it answered 16 times faster.
Read the findings
Shipped · Congressional App Challenge
SnakeID tells you if a snake is venomous
Take a photo, and AWS Lambda plus OpenAI Vision return the species, a color-coded safety class, and one-tap emergency calls. District runner-up, with Special Congressional Recognition.
See how it works
When plans broke
Where it started: building robots in FIRST LEGO League, 2018. Most of what I've built since began with something going wrong.
- 2018
AWS only let adults take its certification exams.
I studied 5 to 10 minutes a day for a year. My dad and I emailed Andy Jassy, and AWS made an exception, then dropped the age limit.
At 9, I became the youngest person to pass the Cloud Practitioner exam.
- 2020
I started Kids Cloud Club to teach cloud computing to kids for free, but teaching over Zoom one class at a time couldn't scale.
I turned to AI, which could act as a tutor for far more kids.
That became Setu Labs and KTutor, an AI tutor with two provisional patent applications naming me as inventor.
- 2024
Building Infotruster at Leangap, a startup program, our freelance developer fell a week behind. That left almost no time to go to market.
I led the recovery: we fixed the website copy and marketed to friends and on social media.
We landed our first 10 paying customers before Demo Day and won Most Outstanding Company.
- 2025
On my AI research internship, SageMaker expected data in S3, and my dataset lived on Hugging Face.
I switched to Colab's free GPU and reran training three times.
The model went from garbled text to 3–4 sensible words out of 5.
- 2026
My AP Research hypothesis was that the bigger model would win. It didn't.
I reported what the data showed.
A fine-tuned 20B model beat GPT-5 on fraud detection: 0.78 F1 vs. 0.65. AP score: 5.
Since 2018
Eight years of building, from my first AWS exam at 9 to demoing Lucky at VISIONS 2026. Pick a year, or hover to pause and drag through time.
In the press
How I got certified at 9, told by NBC4 Washington in an article and a video.
NBC4 Washington · June 12, 2019
Meet the 10-Year-Old Helping Amazon Web Services's Robotics Team
NBC4 covered how AWS turned me away at 9, then dropped its age limit so I could take the Cloud Practitioner exam, and the AWS summer robotics program it led to.
Read the article on NBC4 Washington (opens in a new tab)
NBC4 Washington’s video on how I became the youngest person to pass the AWS exam. Press play to watch.
Recognition
Awards, talks, and the responsibilities people have trusted me with.
Speaker, AWS Public Sector SummitOn the 2019 keynote stage, at age 10
Congressional App ChallengeEntered three years running. SnakeID (2025): district runner-up and Special Congressional Recognition from Rep. Andy Biggs
Most Outstanding Company, LeangapInfotruster; gave the winning Demo Day pitch (2024)
Two provisional patent applications
Named inventor, personalized AI learning content (KTutor)
AP Capstone Diploma
AP Scholar with Honor, 2025 and 2026
College Board National Recognition Program
School Award
Leadership & service
- President, Basha DevOps Coding Club. Co-organizes Day of Code for middle schoolers and the club's community outreach. Founded the school's Hack Club chapter as a freshman.
- Blood Drive Coordinator, National Honor Society: junior coordinator, now senior. Four drives a year, 330+ donations.
- Arizona Boys State. Elected Precinct Committeeman; co-founded East Valley Law.
- Gilbert Mayor's Youth Advisory Council. One of 30 selected to advise the mayor.