Show HN: Semantic search engine for finding relevant VCs and angels

Posted by macieklaskus on Wednesday October 23, 2024 @01:45PM
from the show-hn dept.

We built a search engine that matches startup descriptions with investors based on their historical investments. Write your startup description and get a list of investors who've backed similar companies.

Technical implementation:

- Indexed 9k active VC funds and ~5k angels globally

- Fine-tuned a custom embedding model on real-world pairs of investors and companies

- Developed an identity resolution system to collate portfolio data across many sources including portfolio websites scraped with a custom AI agent

Key features: - Search full investor database without signing up

- Optional email/calendar integration shows 1st/2nd degree connections to investors

- Results ranked by semantic similarity to historical investments

Example query: "B2B SaaS platform for automating accounts payable workflows using OCR and ML" → Returns VCs/angels who've invested in similar enterprise automation/fintech companies

Origin: Built this after struggling with my own seed round. Existing solutions didn't solve the core problem: systematically finding ALL relevant investors, not just the obvious ones.

Would appreciate feedback on:

1. Search result quality/relevance

2. Additional data points that would be useful

3. Performance/latency issues if you encounter any

Team: danishabdullah, combdn, thelifeofrishi, howes, Hossamhamdy20, Isomorpheus

( 6 comments | 6 points | on HN )

Re:Show HN: Semantic search engine for finding relevant VCs ... by UbikAI on Wednesday October 23, 2024 @03:12PM (#41928372)

This is amazing and super effective, just made an account - amazing idea - really great for organizing and understanding my contacts beyond finding new VCs!

Would be awesome if I could see a family tree graph with my connections aswell

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Show HN: Semantic search engine for finding relevant VCs ... by macieklaskus on Wednesday October 23, 2024 @03:24PM (#41928472)

Glad you like it! The family tree graph idea is interesting, but one problem I see with this is that it would quickly branch out so much that it may be unreadable. Do you have a specific use case in mind?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Show HN: Semantic search engine for finding relevant VCs ... by ieuanking on Thursday October 24, 2024 @12:24PM (#41937021)

honestly I agree with that aswell, probably would be a lot to display - my use case was more for seeing the degrees of separation between contacts I already know rather than a list. But probably not super useful - been using heavily tho the past 24 hours really love what you guys are doing here

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Show HN: Semantic search engine for finding relevant VCs ... by satuke on Wednesday October 23, 2024 @03:14PM (#41928381)

Why do you need all those permissions for signing up?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Show HN: Semantic search engine for finding relevant VCs ... by howes on Wednesday October 23, 2024 @03:25PM (#41928481)

We use email metadata permissions to map your contacts, so you can find paths you might have to VCs or other Organisations

But importantly: We don't get access to the email body/content

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Show HN: Semantic search engine for finding relevant VCs ... by satuke on Wednesday October 23, 2024 @03:59PM (#41928776)

I see but I don't think many people will be comfortable giving that permission, I personally am not. You might want to think about another way to achieve what you want to.

[ Parent | on HN ]