Hugo Assist
Entrepreneurs rarely struggle for ideas they struggle to stress-test them. Avinto built Hugo Assist: an AI-powered platform that guides founders through structured strategic reflection and produces a concrete, scored business model assessment in a single session.
About Hugo Assist
An AI-powered recruitment platform that uses conversational AI and structured, AI-assisted questioning to speed up candidate screening and reference checks — built by Avinto with privacy-by-design safeguards for candidates who are minors.
Location
Norway
Company Size
Startup
Industry
AI Software
The Challenge
Great ideas stalling because nobody asked the right questions
Entrepreneurs, both new and experienced, often struggle to develop effective business strategies due to lack of structured guidance, limited access to strategic frameworks, and difficulty identifying blind spots. Without structured reflection, promising ideas risk stagnation or misalignment with market and financial reality.
Access to strategic advisory is expensive and slow. Most founders iterate on instinct rather than evidence, and the tools available either oversimplify or overwhelm.
The Solution
A digital strategy partner that asks, builds, and evaluates — in one session
Hugo Assist acts as an AI-powered strategy partner. Through structured, context-aware dialogue it asks the right questions across vision, customers, market, finance, risk, and scalability then transforms the answers into a Business Model Canvas, a scored evaluation, and a set of actionable recommendations. The whole session runs in a single flow, and the output is ready to take into a workshop or investor conversation.
Core Functionality
Built around how founders actually think through a business
What Made This Harder Than a Standard AI Chat Tool
Prompt architecture at depth
Generic AI prompts produce generic answers. Getting Hugo to ask the right follow-up question for each founder's specific situation required extensive prompt engineering and evaluation.
Structured output from unstructured input
Turning a free-form conversation into a scored, formatted Business Model Canvas without losing nuance required careful pipeline design between the AI layer and the canvas renderer.
Embeddability without compromise
Building the platform as a plugin/iframe that works inside any external website without breaking authentication, state, or security added significant complexity to the frontend and API design.
What our client say
“The collaboration with Avinto has made it possible for me as a startup to develop prototypes and MVP projects without large investments. Together we have established architecture, design and customer journeys. Avinto has contributed both strategically and to the technological development. I particularly appreciate the flexibility, accessibility and that they take responsibility for the entire value chain from specification to stable operation.”
Hanne Sorteberg
Founder of Hugo Assist
