2. Building a Global Community of Users…
CONFIDENTIAL MATERIAL; NOT TO BE DISTRIBUTED
Enterprises
that want to adopt technologies
Find Technological Solutions and
Improve Results Through
Innovation
Startups / Innovative Companies
that develop such technologies
Get Exposed to Enterprises and Find
Clients, Partners, and More
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
“Core” Users:
“Non-Core” Users:
Hubs
Universities
Research Parks
Incubators / Accelerators
Government Agencies
Investors
VC Funds
PE Funds
Banks
Service Providers
Lawyers
Media
Accountants / Auditors
Consultants / Advisors
3. Core Problem
CONFIDENTIAL MATERIAL; NOT TO BE DISTRIBUTED
For Enterprises: it is simply too overwhelming to keep up with what's new. Executives
have to travel around the world just to attend conferences or to spend days on the road to talk
to dozens of innovative companies they can hardly remember afterwards.
For Startups: it is hard for them to get new clients because they don’t have a big sales team.
This is a real pain for them and also for more mature innovative companies that want to
penetrate new markets / countries.
This “Matching Game” is very inefficient and expensive.
In fact, the high-tech business intermediation market is currently:
• very fragmented,
• biased (regional bias),
• expensive, and
• inefficient
4. Solution to Core Problem
CONFIDENTIAL MATERIAL; NOT TO BE DISTRIBUTED
A Business-Oriented Social Network where a Community of Users can
easily find each other, interact, and communicate across the globe.
For Enterprises: it will be cheaper, quicker, and more efficient for them to discover and
learn (Intelligent Search Algorithm) about a given technology/startup through WeSpline
and seize opportunities of collaboration that may otherwise be missed (Intelligent
Recommendations Algorithm).
Startups/Innovative Companies will have the opportunity to actively search, get exposed
to, and communicate with hundreds of Enterprises around the world. Enterprises will be
able to learn about their businesses, products/services, and founding partners.
Save
Time & Money
when searching &
learning
Expand
your Horizons
when looking for
tech or clients
5. Enriching our Community…
CONFIDENTIAL MATERIAL; NOT TO BE DISTRIBUTED
Investors will be able to better identify and follow up on opportunities, especially if they happen to
be in different geographies;
Service Providers will be able to reach potential clients more easily and be reached by them as well;
Hubs will also benefit from this interaction. For example:
• Accelerators / Incubators will be able to better advertise their Special Programs for Startups
and Entrepreneurs, and spread the word about the technologies that they help build;
• Universities – students and researchers – will be able to take Challenges from Enterprises and
develop tailor-made solutions for the Industry. They will also be able to find partners and
sponsors in the Industry for their own projects and new technologies. This will hopefully bring
tech transfer from Academia to the Industry to a whole new level.
Hubs Service ProvidersInvestors
6. Market Size
CONFIDENTIAL MATERIAL; NOT TO BE DISTRIBUTED
Large + SMEs (142 Selected Countries)
Source: World Bank, 2014
~30 mn
companies
~70 K
companies
Technology-Driven Startups
Source: Nasscom Report 2016
7. Product
CONFIDENTIAL MATERIAL; NOT TO BE DISTRIBUTED
Search & Browse
Profiles
Connect
&
Communicate
Learn & Stay
Updated
Take Advantage of
Premium Features &
Engagement Tools
8. Technology
CONFIDENTIAL MATERIAL; NOT TO BE DISTRIBUTED
WeSpline will provide its users with multiple novel Intelligent functions by leveraging the state
of the art technology in:
• Information Retrieval,
• Natural Language Processing,
• Text Mining, and
• Machine Learning
- Intelligent semantic Search technology enables flexible and effective exploration of relevant
companies to engage in business;
- Semantic understanding of company profiles and challenges would enhance state of the art
Recommender System technology to provide accurate matching of tech developers and tech
providers, thus enabling accurate recommendations of companies, technologies or
challenges;
- Powerful Machine Learning techniques would be applied across all the functions in
WeSpline to enable the system to learn from the user interaction data that would be
accumulated naturally as the system is being used, and self-improve its own performance for all
the tasks overtime.
9. Business Model
CONFIDENTIAL MATERIAL; NOT TO BE DISTRIBUTED
Basic Services (FREE) include company/user profiles, dashboard, search, newsfeed, getting
messages.
Premium Services (subscription) include sending messages, chat, advanced search,
alerts/notifications, recommendations, page insights, business analytics, among others. For
premium plan subscribers, we also offer “Pay per Use” packages.
Pay per Use packages include extra in-mails, post at Job Board, offer Courses, and offer
Conferences/Meetups (not all these features will be available at the release date).
Revenue from Ads: the ads will typically show for a given target audience on their
newsfeeds and on the right-hand side of their Dashboards. Users will also be invited to pay to
boost their Newsfeed publications, Challenge posts, or Special Programs posts.
10. Product Release / Distribution Strategy
CONFIDENTIAL MATERIAL; NOT TO BE DISTRIBUTED
Phase in the Release of our product according to the following vectors:
• Features & Users – we plan to release “core” features to “core” users first;
• Countries – we plan to release WeSpline in the US, Israel, and Brazil first.
• Industries – we plan to create critical mass in certain “popular” industries first, so that
we can become a relevant reference for users there. “Popular” industries would be those
that are interesting for most companies such as Cyber Security, Logistics Tech, among
others.
For Scale & Traction, we will focus on distributing our product through Hubs:
• Industry Associations that have Corporations and Mid-Sized Companies as members;
• Accelerators, Incubators, Universities, and VCs, as these hubs may be an efficient
way to reach Startups and Innovative Companies.
11. Competition (examples)
CONFIDENTIAL MATERIAL; NOT TO BE DISTRIBUTED
EFFICIENT
AFFORDABLEEXPENSIVE
INEFFICIENT
(time consuming, biased/regional, or
not adequately designed for that purpose)
Tech Scouters
12. Fernanda Torós, PhD – Founder
Dr. Torós is Founder at WeSpline. She is Founding Partner & CEO at Sabra Capital. Previously, she was
partner and portfolio manager at Oren Investimentos, portfolio manager and head of equity research at Nest
Investimentos, equity analyst at Investidor Profissional and Leblon Equities, economist at Credit Suisse, and
executive at AmBev. In Academia, she was visiting assistant professor at Virginia Tech, where she taught
courses in International Finance, lecturer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where she
taught courses in Corporate Finance, and researcher at the Inter-American Development Bank in D.C., where
she worked during Summer 2002. She has a PhD in Economics and a MS in Finance from the UIUC, and a BA
and MA in Economics from PUC-Rio, Brazil.
CONFIDENTIAL MATERIAL; NOT TO BE DISTRIBUTED
ChengXiang Zhai, PhD – Mentor / Advisor (& Future Partner)
Dr. Zhai is Professor of Computer Science and Willett Faculty Scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign, where he also holds a joint appointment at the Institute for Genomic Biology, Statistics, and the
Graduate School of Library and Information Science. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Nanjing
University in 1990, and a Ph.D. in Language and Information Technologies from Carnegie Mellon University
in 2002. He worked at Clairvoyance Corp. as a Research Scientist and a Senior Research Scientist from 1997 to
2000. He has over 25 years of experience in R&D of novel intelligent information systems from both
academia and industry. His research interests include information retrieval, text mining, natural
language processing, machine learning, biomedical informatics, and intelligent education systems. He has
published over 200 papers and holds 5 patents in these areas. He is the major contributor of the Lemur
toolkit (http://www.lemurproject.org), an information retrieval and text mining toolkit used by many people.
He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist and received multiple awards from industry, including IBM Faculty
Award, HP Innovation Research Award, Microsoft Beyond Search Research Award, Google Research Grant
Award, and Yahoo Faculty Research Engagement Program Award. More info: http://czhai.cs.illinois.edu/.
Team Members
13. Chengrui (Ray) Zhu
Team Manager /
Senior Software Engineer / Backend
Developer
• MS candidate in Computer Engineering at UIUC,
with focus on Backend Software Development.
Previously:
• Worked on projects linked to website
development;
• Published papers in the fields of Electrical and
Computer Engineering;
• BS in Electrical Engineering from Shanghai Jiao
Tong University, China.
Xiangdong (Henry) Yu
Software Engineer /
Frontend Developer
• MS candidate in Electrical and Computer
Engineering at UIUC;
• Serves in the U.S. army as a reservist in Darien,
IL, and his military job is wheeled vehicle
mechanic.
Previously:
• MRI Data Analysist and Signal Test Intern at
NYU Langone Medical Center and Biotronik;
• BS in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from
Texas A&M University at College Station, TX.
CONFIDENTIAL MATERIAL; NOT TO BE DISTRIBUTED
Rongzi (Herbert) Wang
Senior Software Engineer /
Back & Frontend Developer
• BS candidate in Computer Science at UIUC,
with specialization in Data Science and
Machine Learning. He has interest in data
mining, machine learning, and web design.
Previously:
• software engineering intern at Magic
Communication;
• Backend web developer at Optec.lnc.
Pedro Richa Dabarian
(TO HIRE - Brazil):
CFO
Previously:
• Partner and Risk Manager / Compliance
Officer at Sabra Capital;
• Financial analyst at Koin Latam;
• MBA in Investment Management and BA
in Industrial Engineering from PUC-Rio,
with credits also obtained at California
Polytechnic University.
Cassio R. Carvalho Oliveira
(TO HIRE - Brazil)
Head of Sales Brazil
Previously:
• Partner and Sales Officer at Sabra Capital.;
• Middle office analyst at Bozano Investimentos,
CCN Invest and Oren Investimentos;
• Member of the Sales team at The BNY Mellon;
• BA in Business Administration from Universidade
Candido Mendes, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Team Members
14. Use of Proceeds: mainly to hire Software Engineers and pay for Office/Marketing/Trip Expenses.
Suggested Structure: convertible note, with a discount to next round's valuation.
CONFIDENTIAL MATERIAL; NOT TO BE DISTRIBUTED
Funding
US$ 200 K
US$ 300 K
-
US$ 1 mn
We are looking for funding to finish a fully functional MVP of the system by 1H18 and
pre-launch it to selected users (if US$ 300 K is raised) or to launch a MVP by 1H18 to a
larger # of users (if US$ 1 mn is raised).
Angel round
(raised 2016/17)
Pre-Seed round
(to be raised 2017/18)
15. CONFIDENTIAL MATERIAL; NOT TO BE DISTRIBUTED
contact@wespline.comResearch Park @ UIUC
1800 South Oak St., suite 106
Champaign, IL 61820, USA
Social Network:
www.wespline.com
Investor Relations:
www.ir-wespline.com
+1 312 330 2543 Institutional Video:
https://youtu.be/Z6lfiItIGnE
