Why We Built Our Own Consumer App

Product explanation - Consumer App

(as a foundation model and infrastructure for longevity)

When we pitched our ideas, many people — including investors — often asked:
“Why build a consumer-facing product when you could just go 100% Web3, launch a token, and ride the wave?”

It’s a fair question. But for us, this decision wasn’t made on a whim. It came from both personal conviction and structural necessity. Below are the key reasons that guided everything we’ve built in the past six months — starting from one very personal reason.

1. Personal first: the builder’s instinct

I’ve been incubating hardware projects for the past two years. As a builder, watching others build always makes my hands itch — I can’t help but want to create something myself.

In the AI era, I wanted to see if my “product sense” was still sharp. The only real test is putting a product in users’ hands — seeing whether they use it, pay for it, and give feedback that helps us improve it every day.

That’s why I returned to “founder mode” — building something people genuinely want, rather than just theorizing about it. It really makes my day, when I heard that despite our app was super buggy on the launch day, 60% of users are interested and around 10% of them are actively using it on a daily basis.

2. From the Web3 root cause: redefining use cases

When was the last time we saw an exciting new use case in Web3 that wasn’t about DeFi?
To some extent, the market now equates Web3 with finance — and that limits its imagination.

For us, building a consumer-facing app is the most direct way to show that Web3 can serve real human needs.

It’s not about raising funds differently; it’s about building alternative systems that let people participate directly, without relying on centralized authorities.

For users, Sponge represents that possibility:

• It allows people to gain useful insights from their own data.

• It connects collective intelligence to personal improvement.

• It offers a different way to reach autonomy — not just financially, but in health, understanding, and freedom.

Most importantly, it shows that the same blockchain tools once used for speculation can instead help discover personal truth — through decentralized, open AI that learns from all of us, not just from one company’s closed system.

3. Root cause from building our core: data and bias

The reality is simple: to build an intelligent and fair foundation model for longevity, we need data — lots of it, and diverse.

Here’s a simple but shocking fact: in many medical studies, women remain underrepresented — sometimes making up only 13% of participants, depending on the field.
So if you’re a woman and you ask AI to reason about your symptoms, you’re already facing bias in the data it learned from.

That’s why we had two choices:

1. Rely on existing partners to provide data (which works only if you are a health authority or a huge corporation), or

2. Build a product that people love enough to use daily, and that gives them real value in exchange for their data.

As a startup, the second option is the only realistic one.

That’s how Sponge was born — an app that syncs with your calendar and health data to optimize your energy and schedule hour by hour.

Why “energy”? Because it’s the most universal signal of human vitality — the one that connects mind, body, and time. (More on that in another post.)

4. The need to build a more intelligent and open healthcare insight

In recent years, many wearable users have started noticing that their devices collect endless streams of data — yet often fail to turn them into meaningful insights. I’ve heard this from Whoop users, and I’ve felt it myself after six years with Oura. These companies have built beautiful, useful products that helped millions care more about their health — but they also face a structural limit shared by most product-driven companies:

as they grow, they must choose between going deep in one vertical or expanding broadly across many domains.

For hardware-based products, going deep is limited by sensor technology — a single ring or band can only measure so much. Going broad, however, requires specialized domain expertise across physiology, psychology, sleep science, metabolism, and aging — knowledge that no single company can fully master fast enough.

That’s why even the strongest companies will eventually face a ceiling unless they open-source knowledge creation.
In today’s AI era, progress no longer depends on one centralized R&D team. AI has fundamentally restructured how knowledge is produced — enabling distributed experts, developers, and even users to collaborate asynchronously, across disciplines and geographies.

At Avinasi, we see this as the next evolution of healthcare intelligence. Instead of trying to build everything ourselves, we’re building the infrastructure that allows anyone — scientists, developers, and everyday users — to contribute, train, and benefit collectively.

Our network connects AI agents and domain experts worldwide. Together, they clean, annotate, and analyze data, with outputs ranked and validated by our foundation model — and shared back to everyone in real time.

In this new paradigm, speed becomes the true differentiator.
The system that can deliver the most accurate insights at the fastest response time when users contribute data — will win. And that winner is unlikely to be a single company, but rather a collective intelligence network, enabled by AI’s ability to coordinate knowledge and blockchain’s ability to ensure trust, incentives, and transparency.

All the world needs is one successful example showing that both personal self-knowledge and shared financial incentives can coexist.
That’s exactly what Sponge aims to demonstrate: how people everywhere can gain better insights about themselves while helping build a collective intelligence that advances longevity for all.

In conclusion

We didn’t build a consumer app instead of infrastructure.
We built it because it is the foundation for the infrastructure we’re creating — a window into how decentralized AI can work for real people.

Sponge is not just an app; it’s our living experiment for how the next generation of longevity intelligence can grow — open, collective, and powered by everyone’s data and participation.