Catapult

A platform to connect VCs and small business owners.

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Inspiration

90% of startups fail because of a lack of funding. Catapult's mission is to give small business owners the funding they need to make it past their first year by connecting them with venture capitalists, offering a win-win solution for both parties - funding for businesses and high-potential investment opportunities for VCs.

What it does

Using our platform, businesses can one click apply to investors and venture capitalists with a 30-second startup pitch and can also communicate with them directly. These business ideas are filtered through the VC's portfolios, offering a compatibility rating. This way, venture capitalists can further explore the pitches of startups that fit their portfolios and expertise spaces best. Investors can also discover startups to invest in by filtering by the industry spaces they’d like to invest in.

How we built it

We used Google Firebase for our platform authentication, React JS, HTML, Javascript to build our website, Chakra UI to enhance our frontend, as well as Procreate application and Canva for our branding and logo.

Challenges we ran into

While coding, we ran into many problems with getting the backend to function exactly in the way that we wanted. There were numerous bugs and default settings that hindered our progress, but we were eventually able to overcome them through much debugging. We are proud that we were able to work through our bugs, especially on the back-end with saving user information, and logging it. This took us a long time to maneuver and understand, so we are really happy that we ended up getting it to work. On the front end and dashboard/profile development, we learned how to connect components and make it seamless to use.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are extremely proud of how much we accomplished in such a short time and how we were able to integrate Firebase, dashboard, opportunity, and profile page within our project seamlessly. We also are proud of our UI design which inspires users to use it with no friction.

What we learned

We learned about frontend, backend, and connecting the two through the development of our website because many of us did not have web dev experience beforehand. We also learned how to implement the Chakra library for a neat look.

What's next for Catapult

Catapult fuels the startup ecosystem by launching business connections that matter. We will continue to develop our application by finding businesses and startups to beta test our platform and develop more features that will be useful to both venture capitalists and startups.

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