Two teams, formed by students from Cambridge Judge Business School and alumni from the wider University, won joint-first prize at the first Cambridge FinTech Startup Weekend last month.
The joint winners – Localvest and SocialInvest – emerged from a three-day intensive event organised by Accelerate Cambridge, Cambridge Judge’s in-house start-up “accelerator”. Winning teams advance to the Europe regional round of the Global Startup Battle.
Separately, a start-up called Just1Thing won the Social Enterprise award at the Cambridge stage of the Global Startup Battle, propelling them to the next stage of the competition.
Localvest came up with an innovative way for businesses and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to secure financing. By leveraging a proprietary algorithm, an online platform and social media feeds, the team of six looks at empowering small businesses to source investments from their customers and in return offer them high value-for-money gifts and services.
SocialInvest, meanwhile, looks at how people invest. Many people find the concept of investing overwhelming, so the team aims to make investing more accessible and meaningful to a person – based on their interests and networks (such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter). The team of seven is developing technology that matches users to businesses that are meaningful to each other.
Just1Thing, with a team of five, offers an exciting and innovative way to capture social media users and convert them to become donors to different projects. The team is now working on the platform that enables people to make £1 donations towards various campaigns through Twitter.
Click here to learn more about each start-up.