This month, Joi Lam Chow and her platform, TruthShield, have been crowned the winner at the Red Bull Basement National Finals here in Canada. Lam Chow will now represent the country as she heads to San Francisco to compete in the World Finals, pitching her scam-detection platform app.
Lam Chow and her app TruthShield were among the three finalists at the Red Bull Basement National Finals. Each one had the chance to showcase their app idea to a jury as well as participate in a three-minute Shark Tank-like pitch on stage. The Vancouver-based innovator was amongst the likes of Taha Rizvi, who pitched Groundwork, a smart financial tool and Harry Callaghan, who built Chantry, an AI visibility platform built to help tradespeople.
I was among a small panel of jurors who sat and witnessed all three finalists pitch their apps in hopes of winning and advancing to the World Finals. While the solo student developers of Groundwork and Chantry both deserved their flowers, TruthShield ultimately won over the jury.
TruthShield was recognized for the sheer ambition of building a large-scale security platform that protects users from scam calls, AI deepfakes, malicious websites, and phishing links. TruthShield is built on the idea of using AI to more effectively detect suspicious scams and to leverage a shared GPU network as an alternative to expensive AI server farms.
Lam Chow now advances to the World Finals in San Francisco on June 3rd to compete against national winners from more than 40 countries. If successful, she may win the title of Red Bull Basement World Final Winner and USD $100,000 in equity-free funding.
Before moving on to the World Finals, I had the chance to speak with Lam Chow about her vision for TruthShield and her reaction to winning the National Finals.
Vegvari: How are you feeling coming off of being announced the winner?
Lam Chow: I think it’s quite surreal. I never thought I would get into the national finals, and now I’m going to San Francisco. It started with my friend wanting a Red Bull. So then it was like a promotion event. You had to submit an idea in order to could get a Red Bull, and my friend wanted a Red Bull, so then I submitted my idea. So that’s kind of started my journey. In the blink of an eye, I’m here, and then the next thing I know, I’ll be in San Francisco, so it’s kind of cool.
Vegvari: Where did the idea come from initially?
Lam Chow: Whenever I get a phone call from an unknown number, it could be from the hiring manager. It could be from the hospital, saying something like, “Your family’s in the hospital,” or it could be just a scam. So you never know exactly. Should I pick it up? Then there are those messages saying, “Oh, you have a parcel that you need to pick up.” Then you don’t know if I really have a parcel?
So you kind of have those like fears. If there are so many different scam outlets, why can’t we just have a comprehensive protection platform that protects you from everything? So, then you can be certain. I should pick up this call. I should reply to these people. I can go to this website.
It’s also AI deepfakes. My friend got affected by it. I know people personally who got affected by it. That was just the tipping point. It was like, “Okay, you’ve got to do something.” This is because with AI, the pace at which we’re living, it’s just gonna get worse and worse, so you’d better put a stop to it right now.
Vegvari: What sort of hurdles did you experience while developing Truth Shield?
Lam Chow: I don’t come from a computer science background. I study business, and I don’t know how to code. So the first hurdle would be creating a prototype. Even though it’s AI, you still need some kind of sense of coding to understand how I should prompt this AI to build this code for me. That in itself is kind of a hurdle.
It was a lot of trial and error. Then the other thing is that the app is basically run on AI. When I researched the feasibility of the idea, it’s essentially impossible to build your own AI infrastructure because it’s so energy-intensive. You need money. You can’t compete with companies like Google, Amazon, and Meta. So that was the second hurdle.
These hurdles also led me to my solution: a shared network. Like the Airbnb idea, where we turn houses into hotels. We have all these computers sitting there? They have what we need. Can’t we just utilize them?
Vegvari: If you win the World Finals and everything goes well, what’s the first step towards scaling this into a fully realized app?
Lam Chow: The first step would be to actually get all the code for the shared GPU network into action. It would be making sure everything runs smoothly. That would be the first step, but with the money, I could also develop it further and expand the infrastructure.
Then, eventually partner up with chipmakers like AMD. They install TruthShield within their own chipset, so then every device essentially gets protected by default. Something like antivirus software. Every device right now has anti-virus. That’s the scale that we’re trying to get, so everything is protected.
This interview has been edited for language and clarity.
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