Nine students from the Faculty of Mathematics will be competing in the Velocity semi-finals in South Campus Hall on November 9 and 10.
The students are members on six of the twenty-three teams from across campus, all pitching their start-up ideas to Velocity, a start-up incubator based founded by the University of Waterloo.
Since its founding in 2008, Velocity has helped launch more than 400 companies, including such success stories as ApplyBoard, Faire, and Evercloak.
Pitches are split into two nights, with each group having three minutes to pitch their project to a panel of judges from the local community.
At the end of the semi-finals, eight teams will be chosen to compete in the finals on November 23. At the finals, the top four teams will receive $5,000 each in seed money to help launch their start ups.
Zhiying Jiang, a Mathematics PhD student who will be pitching the AFAIK project (see below), explains how the competition “is a great platform for us to get this idea out and to look for kindred minds. Also, we've been building the product for quite a long time without actually explaining our idea to people - this is a great opportunity for us to practice our pitch and get valuable feedback.”
The following projects include students from the Faculty of Mathematics:
Night 1:
Hexa: an ecosystem of EdTech platforms that offer services for students to ace their board exams, get into their dream university, and gain mentorship at every stage of their life. Includes ASM Taseen (Computer Science), Hamza Yusuff (Computer Science), Abrar Rakin (Computer Science), Ahmed Irteja, and Mokaddas Shafkat
Serv2U: an online C2C marketplace for home-cooks to sell food to consumers, where we provide delivery and a platform for such cooks to grow their business. Includes Abhirav Gupta (Computer Science), Srijan Chaudhuri (Math), Sarvesh Wanzare, Aryan Sanyal, Hannabeth Marchant, and Shambhavi Mathur
Night 2:
AFAIK – uses natural language processing techniques to extract concepts from textbooks and to generate prerequisite relationships among them. They then scrape learning resources from major learning platforms and attach these resources to each concept. AFAIK recommends personalized learning paths based on the concepts that learners have marked as mastered. Includes Zhiying Jiang (Mathematics PhD), Orianna Min, and Yiqin Dai
Goose – personalized notification-based app for housing. Instead of actively searching through Facebook, Goose passively finds listings that match your preferences, & makes sure you’re the first to know. Includes Jaemin Han (Math) and Jerry Qu
IDEAL: venture to become the benchmark for recruiting programming professionals through long term evaluation, assessment, and development. IDEAL provides detailed reports in minor and major skills that are essential for a programmer. Submitted by Seyed Aryan Vahabpour (Math).
Pegasus: a web3 application that generates an NFT for each digitally verifiable task (or set of) an individual successfully completes. Submitted by Rohit Kaushik (Math).
To learn more about the semi-finals and each of the competing teams, visit the Velocity website.