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Show HN: Semantic search engine for finding relevant VCs and angels
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
- satuke 2y agoWhy do you need all those permissions for signing up?
- howes 2y agoWe 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
- satuke 2y agoI 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.
- UbikAI 2y agoThis 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
- macieklaskus 2y agoGlad 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?
- ieuanking 2y agohonestly 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