Students Entered a Dark Room, Wrote Their Depression on Paper Slips, and Nobody Knew Who They Were: How a Hackathon Team at Parul University Built Eternia, an Anonymous Mental Health Platform That Refuses to Store Your Data or Train AI on Your Conversations.

Day-by-day coverage across all four days included a structured documentation of academic visits, industrial exposure, and biotechnology research ecosystems, followed by a closing post describing the experience as a happy, informative, and playful little week. The post also acknowledged and thanked Principal G. Chakraborthy and Class Teacher Jainee Vashi for their guidance and support throughout the tour.

• Day 1: Covered CSIR-IICT and Hetero Labs, focusing on drug discovery research, analytical instrumentation, and large-scale pharmaceutical manufacturing processes
• Day 2: Documented sessions on intellectual property strategy, NIAB’s translational research, and biotechnology applications in healthcare and animal science
• Day 3: Highlighted IKP Knowledge Park, CDFD, and AIC-CCMB, emphasizing incubation systems, genetic research, forensic science, and biotech startups
• Day 4: Included Indian Immunologicals, Converge Biotech, and Piramal Pharma, covering vaccine production, One Health approach, entrepreneurship, and industrial pharmaceutical systems

Syno Varghese Day 4

The founding team asked one transformative question: if anonymity and safety are the keys to helping students open up, how can this model be replicated across every school, college, and university in India?

The answer was Eternia: a digital Black Room.

The platform architecture was deliberately designed around anonymity, privacy, and trust.

• Login via APAAR ID (ABC ID): a government-approved digital identity system verifying genuine student status without exposing personal details such as name, age, gender, institution, or background
• Once inside the platform, the student exists only as a user identity, not as a visible profile or personal record
• Students can ask questions, discuss emotional concerns, and receive support from trained professionals while remaining completely anonymous
• No interaction history is stored in an identifiable format
• No mental health conversations or personal disclosures are used to train AI systems or recommendation models
• Designed in alignment with India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDPA)

This final point is one of Eternia‘s strongest differentiators. The founders believe many digital mental health platforms collect and retain extensive behavioural and emotional data over long periods, later using that information to train AI systems. Their argument is that deeply personal mental health conversations should never become invisible datasets without meaningful consent.

Eternia intentionally avoids this model entirely. The platform was designed not merely as a compliance-oriented product, but as a values-driven system built around dignity, emotional safety, autonomy, and ethical responsibility toward students navigating vulnerable moments in life.

At its core, Eternia is not simply a startup. It is a response to a crisis that students across institutions silently experience but rarely discuss openly.

Eternia began at the Smart India Hackathon, one of India’s largest student innovation competitions. The founding team, led by Priyanshi Rathore, initially developed the idea during an internal hackathon at Parul University before progressing through higher rounds of evaluation. What started as a student-led concept around mental health support gradually evolved into a structured startup framework.

The hackathon eventually became the entry point into PIERC (Parul Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research Centre), the university’s startup incubation ecosystem. The incubation selection process itself was intentionally rigorous and designed to filter ideas based on execution capability rather than presentation alone.

• Phase 1: founders present the core idea and identify the real-world problem they aim to solve
• Phase 2: evaluation by coordinators, institute advisors, and healthcare experts through structured PPT-based assessment rounds
• 15-day commitment programme: attendance, participation, consistency, and dedication are continuously monitored, and teams failing to maintain standards are removed from the pipeline
• Market validation stage: a two-month field survey involving students, parents, teachers, and mental health professionals to verify whether the problem genuinely exists at scale

The Eternia team spent nearly two months conducting interviews, collecting feedback, validating assumptions, and refining the platform’s direction before receiving full institutional support from PIERC. Instead of relying on assumptions, the founders focused on evidence-based validation by repeatedly engaging with stakeholders across the education and healthcare ecosystem.

According to Mrs Sonal Sudani, one of the defining reasons the startup received backing was the founders’ consistency throughout the validation phase. Their willingness to repeatedly gather feedback, revisit conversations, improve the concept, and persist through long evaluation cycles demonstrated execution discipline beyond the initial idea itself.

Three co-founders. All CSE students at Parul University:

• Priyanshi Rathore (Founder) – CSE AI, 1st year. Driving force behind the project.
• Yash Kumar Khatik – CSE IEP
• Gaurav Shah – CSE AIDS

Small team. Clear intent. Two months of intensive market research. Multi-round PIERC selection. The team’s strength is conviction and resilience, not headcount.

Mrs. Sonal Sudani spoke candidly about the challenges ahead:

• Institutional acceptance: gaining buy-in from school and university administrators for anonymous mental health access requires navigating bureaucratic, cultural, and regulatory obstacles
• Trust and adoption: students need sustained communication that Eternia is different from other platforms, that data is safe, that help is available without judgement
• Professional capacity: as the platform scales, enough trained psychologists, counsellors, and mental health NGOs must be available to respond meaningfully. PIERC is helping model professional partnerships.
• Geographic expansion: already exploring partnerships with universities in Pune. Regulatory environments and institutional cultures differ across states.

The Black Room worked because it was physical, contained, and immediate. Eternia must replicate that psychological safety at digital scale across institutions that have different cultures, different administrators, and different levels of openness to student mental health support. The challenge is not technical. It is institutional and cultural.

Eternia is one of 254 startups incubated through PIERC. The same ecosystem that produced Solnce Energy (Rs 1 crore on Shark Tank India Season 4, backed by Aman Gupta), Voldebug Innovations (Outstanding Performance Award from Home Minister Amit Shah), Dori Handcrafts (showcased before the Prime Minister at the Republic Plenary Meet), and Cligent Aerospace (India’s first hydrogen-electric aircraft startup) is now producing a mental health platform built by first-year CSE students who saw a problem, tested it in a dark room with paper slips, and are building a digital solution that refuses to compromise on privacy.

PIERC has 4 startup studios across Gujarat (Vadodara, Surat, Ahmedabad, Rajkot). Rs 20 crore+ in funding provided to startups. Rs 40 crore+ in revenue generated. The incubation infrastructure is not theoretical. It produces outcomes. Eternia is the latest evidence that the pathway from hackathon idea to market-ready startup exists and is supported at every stage.

Check – Why Study Innovation at Parul University