Relay

Landing Page
Marketplace Page

Inspiration

At the end of every term, students haul a mini fridge home on a train or leave a good desk by the dumpster. Meanwhile, someone two buildings over is buying that exact desk brand new. The stuff and the people are already in the same place... but nothing connects them.

What it does

Relay allows buyers and sellers to exchange items, like a marketplace. Sellers post their items for purchase or donation along with an urgency level, which shortens how long the item stays listed. Buyers keep a list of what they need, and Relay checks whether they can really get it, comparing price to budget, pickup times to when they arrive in town, and how far they would walk. If two people want the same thing, it goes to whoever has no other option.

How we built it

Our main feature is enabling buyers to semantically search objects on the marketplace. The search reads what you meant instead of matching keywords. For example, typing "something to keep my milk cold" gives you a mini fridge, even though none of those words are in the listing. It runs a language model inside the app, so there is no API key and no server call, which means it still works on bad conference wifi.

Behind that, a scheduling algorithm builds the actual handoff plan so nobody has to negotiate in a chat thread. Built with Next.js and Supabase, and it runs in about a tenth of a second.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge was the 2nd pivot to independent university students. We had built everything around company-to-company interactions, so the pivot made us fundamentally restructure our product.

We also tried Snowflake and hit a wall. Their AI functions are locked on trial accounts, confirmed on both the standard trial and the student one the hackathon gave us. Eventually we got it to work, but it took a while.