The Velocity Fund is a non-equity grant program for startups. Each year Velocity produces three pitch competition events where the Velocity Fund awards at least $115,000 in money to winners. To read more about the Velocity Fund Finals, please visit their website.
At the Velocity Fund Finals, Spring 2015, the following students from the Math faculty pitched their ideas:
HiredWell, the winner of the People’s Choice award in the $5K category, is a mobile-optimized solution that enables brick-and-mortar businesses to seamlessly gather all required information from walk-in job seekers.
Candidate information is neatly organized online in one place, and the easy-to-read dashboard lets employers quickly assess and screen key job seeker information without ever having to look at a resume.
The team of HiredWell consists of Khallil Mangalji (4A Business and Computer Science), Samir Remtulla (Honors Business Administration ’11, Western), Arif Bhanji (Honors Business Administration ’12, Western) and Nicole Duncan (Master of Science ’12, Western)
The participants of the $25K category included:
Knote: “Don’t work hard, work smart” is the motto that Ron Glozman lives by. This 2B Computer Science and Business Administration student has developed a platform that reduces the hassle of going through multiple documents to find information by extracting the relevant information and creating a summary for the user’s ease.
Knote has developed a natural language processing and artificial intelligence based system to eliminate the frustration of note taking and studying. Most interestingly, this system works in any language and any alphabet!
OneSet: This unusual team, consisting of Computer Science students Moez Bhatti (’15) and Omas Abdullah (’14), and Amad Abdullah (Master of Public Service ’14) and George Xu (Master of Applied Science ’14, Simon Fraser) understands that the problem with fitness is not starting a workout regime, it’s the fact that people give up.
So they created “OneSet”, a fitness community that is now being used by everyone from NBA stars to Olympic medalists. What makes this unique are the 15-second videos that people use to share their workout ideas. They can also browse through thousands of community submitted videos categorized by Booty, Home Workouts, Fat Burn, and much more! The fact that OneSet’s 30-day customer retention is 20% as compared to an aggregate 3% proves that this team is all set for a bright future.
To read more about the Velocity Fund Finals, Spring 2015, please visit University of Waterloo’s Daily Bulletin.