Welcome to the Proof of Usefulness Hackathon spotlight, curated by HackerNoon’s editors to showcase noteworthy tech solutions to real-world problems. Whether you’re a solopreneur, part of an early-stage startup, or a developer building something that truly matters, the Proof of Usefulness Hackathon is your chance to test your product’s utility, get featured on HackerNoon, and compete for $150k+ in prizes. Submit your project to get started!
In this interview, we sit down with Ayush Singh to discuss HostLens AI, an innovative agentic assistant built to help users evaluate the U.S. rental market. Read on to learn how this tool uses GraphRAG and Airbnb data to provide real-time investment viability and ROI insights.
What does HostLens AI do? And why is now the time for it to exist?
An Agentic GraphRAG AI assistant giving users real-time ROI & revenue insights on U.S. apartment rentals based off Airbnb data. Now’s a good time for HostLens AI to exist because the short-term rental market moves rapidly, and having a central, intelligent tool to navigate fragmented listing data provides a crucial competitive edge for individual hosts and real estate investors.
What is your traction to date?
With over 750K Airbnb hosts in the U.S. and counting, the Airbnb-friendly listing data our agent has access to. New & current hosts will have the flexibility to lease or rent a home while still enjoying the opportunity to host guests, allowing one to make additional money without the long-term commitment of property ownership
Who does HostLens AI serve?
Prospective renters, property managers, or even real estate analysts with general inquiries about rental markets, earning potential (ROI & Net Revenue), and investment viability in today's America
What technologies were used in the making of HostLens AI? And why did you choose the ones most essential to your tech stack?
HostLens AI integrates Neo4j for its powerful GraphRAG capabilities, ensuring sophisticated relationship traversal and deep market analysis. To process continuous data and serve the AI assistant efficiently, the platform relies on Airflow, Selenium, Structured Streaming (Spark Connect + Kafka), GraphQL, FastAPI, LangChain, Streamlit, and MLflow. This advanced technology stack was deliberately chosen to facilitate a highly responsive, intelligent chat interface capable of agentic tool use and real-time smart reasoning.
Around the Web who has been noticing HostLens AI?
HostLens AI is currently a pre-launch project that debuted as part of a Neo4j Aura Hackathon. As it transitions into a public cloud application, it is poised to capture the attention of a wide audience of Airbnb hosts and rental investors actively seeking holistic, easy-to-access predictions on the U.S. housing market.
What excites you about this HostLens AI's potential usefulness?
As an Airbnb host myself as well as an avid user of Airbnb when looking for rentals during travel stays, I'm always on the lookout for the best prices. I often monitor market trends in the same area I host my timeshare to give competitive rates to renters, but I also hope to expand my host properties around the country.
I aimed to find a listings site showcasing the hottest trends on property listings. It's a good thing that Airbnb has a page for this. However, some problems I had included manually searching the listings, as well as not being able to easily get the data in a central forum via a public data API or purchasable dataset.
This agent with a chat UI allows a user to have a seamless conversation (with stored memory) to retrieve listings/cities by meaning. It supports hierarchical market analysis, region-based aggregation, relationship traversal, and agentic tool use to give informed responses with smart reasoning.
Meet our sponsors
Bright Data: Bright Data is the leading web data infrastructure company, empowering over 20,000 organizations with ethical, scalable access to real-time public web information. From startups to industry leaders, we deliver the datasets that fuel AI innovation and real-world impact. Ready to unlock the web? Learn more at brightdata.com.
Neo4j: GraphRAG combines retrieval-augmented generation with graph-native context, allowing LLMs to reason over structured relationships instead of just documents. With Neo4j, you can build GraphRAG pipelines that connect your data and surface clearer insights. Learn more.
Storyblok: Storyblok is a headless CMS built for developers who want clean architecture and full control. Structure your content once, connect it anywhere, and keep your front end truly independent. API-first. AI-ready. Framework-agnostic. Future-proof. Start for free.
Algolia: Algolia provides a managed retrieval layer that lets developers quickly build web search and intelligent AI agents. Learn more.