InvestMeet

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Companies marketplace - Heinz
Companies marketplace - Adidas
Companies marketplace - Hydroflask
Companies marketplace - Penguin Random House
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Investors marketplace - Maria Brown
Investors marketplace - Joshua Anderson
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Investors marketplace - Frankie O'Ryan
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Inspiration

Nitya Arora, one of the members of our team, has been working on an independent project called Identity Wallet (identity-wallet.com) alongside external software developers for the past 2 years. Her experience working on an early stage start-up inspired the idea behind InvestMeet. The rest of the team members - Anushka Parmanand, Tanisha Mehta, and Kyra Ramesh Krishna - helped her develop the idea.

What it does

InvestMeet is a web application that connects relevant companies with potential investors and mentors. Upon signing up and logging in, companies will be able to browse through a list of investors that suit their needs and can match their funding requirements. Each investor page displays their past experience, short bio, and contact information.

The platform also encourages investors to actively seek out companies with products they are passionate about. This takes place on an investor-facing company marketplace where investors can browse through companies based on their industry of interest, specific keywords, business models and even number of investors the company has thus far attracted. Each business’s industry, business model, and short interest bio is displayed.

Companies can also research other companies that are similar to them to scope out the competition or plan mergers/acquisitions.

How we built it

For our website, we made use of a Django backend, which involved making use of a SQLite Database and a frontend with HTML/CSS and JavaScript for animated content, features and web displays. We made use of unsupervised learning methods of clustering and principal component analysis within our backend as well as statistical analysis on a range of company information from crawling the web for information of well-renowned companies and obtaining data about their statistics such as the number of investors they have and information about their approximate revenue range. This allowed us to gather enough information about companies to populate our database and create an accurate method of comparing and ranking companies by similarity and “success” within their industry. Ranking algorithms were also used to supplement the features found in the comparing and ranking companies pages through conducting searches through the keywords, interests and industries.

Challenges we ran into

A significant challenge we ran into was trying to find a collaborative platform on which we could work cohesively and that updates frequently so others can view changes instantly. Since everybody in our group had different interests and abilities with regards to programming, we had to distribute the work as such. Two of us focused on back-end and the other two on front-end UI design. A major challenge we faced had to do with our website frequently crashing and our pages not loading. We also faced a few issues with the UI design in terms of getting alignment correct and images to show up due to using two different IDEs at one point in time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of having come up with a project that engages with a significant problem in a multi-faceted way. Not only were we able to solve the problem of not being able to obtain investment and the hardships that companies experience when trying to find investors who care genuinely about their cause, we were also able to tackle the individual problems that entrepreneurs have with being left in the dark about where they rank in comparison to other businesses if they are not large-scale companies, necessarily. We also believe that those of us that didn’t start off with an expertise in HTML, Python, Web frameworks like Django, and unsupervised learning through collaborating with others in the group.

What we learned

When we started the Hackathon, we all had varying levels of expertise and knowledge. We were able to share this knowledge with each other and together learned how to integrate Django, html, and Python. We also used a new collaborative IDE instead of our usual Visual Studio Code with localhost running. This was a bit of a learning curve as we faced many challenges with sharing, placement, and website crashes.

What's next for InvestMeet

We are really excited about this project because of how relevant and useful we believe it could be for so many small business owners. We have had discussions with potential collaborators who have expressed interest in taking our idea forward and launching themselves (as companies) on it.