A former Altrincham Grammar School for Girls pupil has become one of the youngest founders from Greater Manchester to secure backing from one of the world’s most prestigious startup accelerators.
Erin McGurk, who attended AGGS between 2017 and 2024, has been accepted into Y Combinator with her artificial intelligence startup, Egoist Machines.
Y Combinator, based in Silicon Valley, is regarded as one of the world’s leading startup accelerators, having previously backed household names including Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox and Reddit. Acceptance rates are typically below 1%.
McGurk is co-founder and CEO of Egoist Machines, which is developing a product called AI Passport, designed to allow people to securely carry their personal preferences, context and data between different AI tools, apps and websites instead of repeatedly starting from scratch.
The startup is opening a waitlist for AI Passport following its acceptance into the latest Y Combinator programme.
McGurk’s co-founder is Dr David Khachaturov, who holds a PhD in Machine Learning Security from the University of Cambridge and is a Computer Science Bye-Fellow at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge.
The pair met through Caledonian dancing while studying at Cambridge before deciding to build the company together.
Explaining the idea behind AI Passport, McGurk said: “People now move between ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, shopping sites, travel tools, work apps and new AI products all the time. Each one wants context, but none of that context travels well.
“You keep repeating who you are, what you like, what you’re working on, what your constraints are, and what you already told another system.”
AI Passport aims to solve that problem by giving users a single place to store and control their personal AI context.
McGurk, who is also known online as @erinmerylstudy and has built one of the UK’s largest educational content channels with over 500,000 Instagram followers, said she hopes her journey inspires other young people from the North West to pursue careers in technology.
“Growing up in South Manchester and going to AGGS, I did not see many people, especially women, taking the route I’m taking now: building a technology company, raising from Y Combinator, and moving to Silicon Valley,” she said.
“I’d love to make that path feel more visible and possible for girls who are where I was a few years ago.”
She added: “I’d love other ambitious young people in the UK to see this and think, ‘Why not me?’
“You do not have to grow up next to Silicon Valley to build something important. You can come from Manchester, go through the British education system, and still end up working on a global technology problem.”
