FoundHer

We connect young women with opportunities, funding, mentorship, and like-minded collaborators to build anything you want regardless of your age, experience, background, location, or resources.

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Project Title FoundHer

Tagline Build Without Barriers. A global platform helping young women discover opportunities, find collaborators, and build projects regardless of background or financial status.

Inspiration Millions of talented young women have ideas, ambitions, and potential to create impact. However, many face barriers that prevent them from accessing opportunities and resources that could change their lives. Information about scholarships, fellowships, and programs is often scattered across the internet. At the same time, many students lack access to networks, mentorship, or collaborators who could help them build projects or apply for these opportunities. These challenges disproportionately affect women, especially those from underrepresented or low-income backgrounds. We created FoundHer to remove these barriers and make opportunity, collaboration, and mentorship accessible to women everywhere. Our mission is simple: Gender, age, background, experience, or money should never be a barrier to building.

What it does FoundHer is a global platform designed to help young women discover opportunities, connect with collaborators, and build projects together. The platform combines opportunity discovery, collaboration tools, and application management in one ecosystem. Users can: Discover Opportunities Search a curated database of scholarships, fellowships, research programs, and leadership opportunities worldwide. Opportunities can be filtered by education level, field, modality, eligibility, and women-focused initiatives. Track Applications Save opportunities and track application progress with a built-in application manager and checklist system. Find Collaborators Students can publish collaboration posts using a simple format: “I HAVE: [Skill/Access] | I NEED: [Skill/Access]” Examples: I HAVE: Python/Backend | I NEED: UI/UX Design I HAVE: Smith College Application Experience | I NEED: Research Partner This allows users to find teammates, cofounders, and project collaborators. Join or Create Groups FoundHer enables users to create groups in three different ways: Project Squad: Build a startup, research project, or product together. Motivation Circle: Apply to scholarships or programs together for accountability and mutual support. Skill-Swap Pair: Reciprocal mentorship where users exchange knowledge and guidance. AI-Powered Matching The platform recommends opportunities and collaborators based on tags in a user’s profile, including skills, interests, and goals. This helps users find opportunities and partnerships they might never have discovered otherwise.

How we built it Vercel V0 (frontend) + Supabase (database) + Gemini (coding help) + ChatGPT (coding help).

Challenges we ran into Building a platform that combines multiple features—opportunity discovery, collaboration tools, messaging, and application management—within a short hackathon timeframe was challenging. We needed to design a scalable database structure that could support opportunities, user profiles, collaboration posts, groups, and application tracking simultaneously. Another challenge was ensuring the platform felt like a real community product, even in an early prototype stage. To address this, we designed structured datasets and example user interactions so the platform could demonstrate real use cases.

Accomplishments that we're proud of We are proud that FoundHer successfully integrates several tools that are normally scattered across different platforms into one ecosystem. Key accomplishments include:

  • Building a working opportunity discovery platform
  • Creating a collaboration marketplace for students
  • Implementing an application management system
  • Designing a mentorship and skill-swap matching model
  • Developing a scalable structure that can support global users
  • Most importantly, we created a platform with the potential to empower young women by increasing access to opportunities, mentorship, and collaboration networks.

What we learned Through this project we learned how to: design scalable database schemas for complex platforms integrate frontend interfaces with backend services use AI development tools to accelerate product development build user-focused features for global communities We also learned how powerful technology can be when used to expand access and inclusion.

What's next for FoundHer We envision FoundHer becoming a global ecosystem for women innovators and students. Future plans include:

  • expanding the global opportunity database
  • implementing AI-powered matching for mentorship and collaboration
  • creating funding pipelines for student-led projects
  • partnering with universities, nonprofits, and organizations to list opportunities directly on the platform
  • building a global community of women supporting each other’s growth Our long-term vision is to ensure that every girl with ambition has access to the opportunities, networks, and support she needs to build her future regardless of any barrier.

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