VCrowd

Inspiration

90% of startups fail. So why invest? For the one unicorn that has a 200,300, or even a 700% return on your investment. Usually, those lucky enough to invest in these unicorn startups come from a venture background. Known as venture capitalists and angel investors, the individuals who successfully invest in the risky world of startups have a diversified skill set and experienced background in investing. This is something the average individual lacks which puts him at a disadvantage when it comes to investing, especially in startups. We wanted to change that. VCrowd allows the opportunity for anyone and everyone to seed invest in VCrowd vetted startups for equity at as low as $50 a stake.

What it does

Every 2-3 months VCrowds accredited board of Venture Capitalists and Angel Investors vet 50-60 startups. These startups are posted to the VCrowd site where individuals can contribute to the fund, and in return are given the opportunity to decide what startups their money goes to without taking the risk of just that startup failing. This is because when an individual contributes to the fund his/her contribution is treated as a percent of the mutual fund. Meaning, how the fund as a whole performs in the market is how the individual receives returns not based on his/her money's distribution in the fund. This targets a unique market place and allows anyone from a college student to a doctor to invest in a sector that was previously inaccessible to the masses. In addition, it not only gives startups seed funding but a diverse network of ambassadors as well.

How I built it

Leveraging an API of successful companies as mock data, information, and photos of these companies were scraped off the internet using R. Then using SQL as a database combined with PHP acting as an intermediary between the backend and HTML/CSS/Javascript coded frontend a working web application was developed.

Challenges I ran into

Some images weren't scraped correctly, we found a solution to this last minute but didn't have time to implement it. GIven more time we could implement the code we created to fix this issue.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Extensive research and interviewing was done to find a unique fintech product. The MVP is fully functional. The team collaborated and evolved the idea together. We stayed up18 hours!