Project Name:
B2B Financial Due Diligence Platform
Name of the organization or individual submitting the proposal:
Parth Ajmera. I am a computer engineer graduate from IIT Madras (NIRF ranked 1 institute in India) and a blockchain enthusiast. I interned at Microsoft where I got some hands-on experience with backend projects with my graduate thesis in applications of blockchain for applied cryptography.
Describe your project
Problem Statement - Startups, when raise money from investors, have to share their internal finances and documents to each and every angel investors or VC firm so that they can perform their due diligence. Each of them have their own way of doing it but follow a standard SOP for the same. Founders have to trust that the investor will not leak/share their internal finance docs to their competitors or outside for a matter of fact while investors have to go through a cycle to verify the financials shared. Here lacks an infrastructure where they both can verify each other’s documents without actually getting the full picture of it. This process becomes a pain point & blocker for the company as well as the investors.
Our Vision - We want be a secured and trusted source of information and incorporate transparent yet selective visibility across founders and investors in the startup ecosystem as there are many frauds in the process and significant efforts required to verify the financials shared. By this, we can provide verified financials without actually revealing the complete data using Sia chain, and alongside be a complete ERP for finance as a platform to bucketize spends and their in-depth analysis.
Who benefits from your project?
Investors in terms of reducing their efforts towards the verification of data and once invested in the company, for easy and real-time spend updates. While parsing, an unauthorized transaction can be flagged for better transparency.
Founders by managing and analyzing company’s spends and data being bucketed automatically without manual efforts. Alongside, founder can ensure there is no data editing done by any relevant/managing employee.
Product Stakeholders & Features
We aim to provide a platform where Founders join with their company accounts & upload their recent-most financial statements (bank statements/Income Tax Returns/Existing ERP downloaded data), we parse through it and generate a standardized analysis + summary of the data in terms of graphs, outliers, major influx/outfluxes etc. This sensitive data encrypted and distributed in chunks with IPFS & Sia nodes can be stored across with no central ownership.
Investors join the platform and upload their SOP on the chain they follow to do the due diligence for a company they are interested in. When this investor wants to do the due diligence, they request the company via our platform to allow carrying over the given SOP. If and once the founders approve them, our platform performs fetched data from the each step and gets back to the investor with the findings and insights as per the SOP they have provided without actually sharing any company finances. The investors can now proceed with next steps accordingly if they see fit.
The upper hand that we have here is that we will be using the sia network to store the data & for hash verification to verify that neither the SOP from Investor, nor the Financials from the founder change just before/after a request to share. This also increases their trust in us since we do not own the entire data thanks to the underlying IPFS & our sia chain. We will do a key level encryption of the data that gets stored so that it’s secure enough for the founders to upload!
Features
- A web & PC desktop app for both the founders as well as the investors
- Calculate & Present key financial metrics like net profits, losses, EBITDA, gross margins, etc. from uploaded bank statements}
- Interactive charts and graphs for investors and founders to understand the financial health of the company
- Permission-based access control to granularly control how much data and insights are shared to the investor
- NLP model for Founders to get insightful level answers by just looking at the data & no advanced Excel fomulas or SQL queries.
- Discussion module between the investor & founders to request additional data or clarify doubts
- A timeline view of financial metrics to track the progress and growth of the startup over time
- Provision for founders to tag expenses in the uploaded bank statements, helping investors understand the allocation of funds
- A due diligence checklist feature that guides founders on the documents needed for a general investor scrutiny
- A secure digital vault to store and share critical legal and financial documents with investors
- A smart recommendation system that suggests cost-saving strategies based on the startup’s sector based spending patterns
- A feature for founders to set personalized alerts for specific financial indicators or thresholds
How will the Sia ecosystem benefit form this?
- Our aim aligns well with the ecosystem in making user-owned data a standard and a common practice. With the financial data not being in any parties’ hand, they trust the decentralisation layer with us.
- The data stored on chain will use auto renewable contracts and a Sia node will be running on our instance running renterd to benefit from the system.
- We plan to build the PoC with end to end encryption of data and then connect with fellow angels to get feedback & beta testing of the product.
Grant Specifics
Amount of money requested and justification with a reasonable breakdown of expenses:
For the initial model, we are seeking for a 10K USD grant, mainly divided across:
- 5k $ - As my stipend, as I’ll be working fulltime on the underlying blockchain and backend.
- 2k $ - Designer, for Mobile and Desktop UI/UX.
- 2k $ - Frontend Developer
- 1k $ - Hosting Charges
Timeline with measurable objectives and goals
May 2024:
- User Research & Collection of different possible financial data documents
- Design the UI of the platform for the founder side
- Build the algorithm for parsing the collected documents
- K-Means data anonymization of the financial documents after parsing for passing it to the NLP layer.
- Decide on the LLM to be used & build the data extraction module
- Design the data model & store the data necessary for recalculation/metrics on the Investor side on Sia
- Get feedback from founder friends on the platform coming together & continuously ask for more features that might come up
- Host a staging server integrated with the CI
- Designer starts working on the Investor Side
- Test & Wrap the Founder module end to end
June 2024:
- Build the Frontend/UI of the founder module in the app once the backend & the layers along with the data model integrations
- Parsing of SoP from the Investors side and integration with the existing data model
- Test & Wrap the Investor Module end to end
- Design the Landing Page
- Integrate both Founder & Investor modules together
- Develop the Landing Page summarising the product for the community
Potential risks that will affect the outcome of the project:
- Direct dependency on the network & renterd for the data availability
- Founders might not be comfortable with the data being stored so we might have to consider the option of just data processing and no storage of raw data for them
Development Information
Will all of your project’s code be open-source?
Yes
Leave a link where code will be accessible for review.
We’ll link a GitHub repo the moment its created
Do you agree to submit monthly progress reports?
Yes
Contact info
Email: ajmeraparth132@gmail.com
Any other preferred contact methods: