TechBBQ x Vicinity: Results & reflections on AI-powered networking
We introduced Vicinity to investors and founders at the Nordics’ premier startup event – TechBBQ. The event hosted over 8500 attendees, including 350 speakers, 3500 startups, and 1300 investors. Given the magnitude of the event, making the most of networking can be a significant challenge. The necessity of preparation and the concentrated effort to identify the right connections makes this a time-consuming and complex process.
Committed to solving the networking challenge, we collaborated with the TechBBQ team to employ Vicinity in providing a tailored shortlist for each participant, based on their specific criteria.
Founders had the opportunity to showcase their businesses more effectively, guided by Vicinity regarding commonly asked questions by investors. The process starts with an upload of their pitch decks and providing detailed information about their startup’s specifics and investment needs. By doing so, founders received comprehensive startup profiles enhanced with data from trusted resources utilized by Vicinity, including financial information, ownership details, team structure and skillset, and more.
Investors could swiftly share their investment thesis via a chat interface, initiating all necessary questions to build their investment criteria, thereby receiving better recommendations. This information was utilized by our AI-powered matchmaking engine to suggest startups that are closely aligned with their specific investment focus. Investors were able to review these recommendations, delve deeper into startup profiles if desired, and be better equipped with information when meeting founders to maximize their time. Founders received exposure to potential investors who may not have been on their radar previously. Investors got a more focused look on the landscape of founders, attending the event.
The results followed: 300 founders seamlessly created startup profiles uploading their pitch decks to Vicinity and 250 investors submitted their investment thesis. The AI helped generate more than 170 meeting invites during the event, and likely more new connections being forged offline, out of reach for our tracking, as well.
Given the ambitious plan to develop what became Vicinity, and release it right at a major event like TechBBQ, we’re very happy with the results. We’re also very grateful for the trust the TechBBQ team had in our ability to deliver on such an important challenge in a short amount of time, and appreciate all the hard work their team did in making this a success together with us.
Just as important as the results are the learnings of this journey.
Learnings from utilizing AI in Vicinity
Some of the challenges we tackled along the way included ensuring that, when users interact with the AI chat (i.e., free text format), we gather the correct data in the appropriate format. This required training the AI to detect what information is crucial, how to extract it with apt questions, and how to visualize it correctly. This process called for extensive testing and experimenting with various potential cases.
We’ve had a few curious, even amusing cases while preparing our chosen AI model to be utilized for the use cases in Vicinity. For example, upon asking vital questions to collect data about a startup or investment criteria, when the user responded with ‘thank you’ to conclude the interaction, the AI interpreted this as an approval to ask a few more questions. In another scenario, when an investor specified ‘industry agnostic’ as part of the investment criteria, the AI recommended companies practicing an industry-agnostic approach, instead of companies from diverse industries. At times, the AI even initiated interactions on its own – posing and answering its own questions. Needless to say, all of these cases led to in-product improvements and learnings for better prompt engineering.
To provide more precise recommendations, we asked investors to define the essential investment criteria, as well as those of lesser importance for them. This was a crucial step to present investors with the startups that aligned closely with their specific criteria, as it allowed us to perfect the prompts and deliver recommendations fitted for investors’ interests and needs.
Although challenging at times, this was an enlightening experience, which contributed to the discussion about training and fine-tuning our own AI model, incorporating our knowledge about the dynamics between startups and investment organizations, their needs, and shortcomings.
What is the future plan for Vicinity?
Vicinity continues to live as a standalone product outside the scope of TechBBQ as an AI powered analyst for investors. We have moved the product to a closed beta phase, where we have invited a selected group of investors from the Nordics, Baltics and Benelux to help shape this tool to better meet their needs and those of their peers.
We expect to be ready with an enhanced version of Vicinity for all investors by the end of this year. At the same time we will be working with TechBBQ to create an improved version for founders making the networking experience even better for next year’s event.
How can I stay updated on Vicinity’s progress?
Stay updated with Vicinity’s progress by following us on social media and visiting www.myvicinity.ai for updates. If you’re interested in joining our closed beta you’re welcome to reach out to us at contact@myvicinity.ai
Diliana Beeva
Head of Culture & Partnerships
Linkedin
Diliana is one of Lab08’s first employees. She was previously responsible for the company’s recruitment and branding activities. Currently, she is focused on expanding Lab08’s customer portfolio and onboarding clients to Lab08’s own product, Vicinity.
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