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.
In fact, this “Matching Game” between different players is:
• 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 and Investors around the world.
Enterprises and Investors 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 or
investment opportunities
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. According to the Financial Times article entitled “Artificial intelligence is
guiding venture capital to start-ups”, one of the biggest challenges for venture capital companies is finding
interesting investment targets before anyone else. ‘My job used to be about getting on a plane once a
week and going to a different European city to try to find people who were doing interesting things,’
says Roberto Bonanzinga, co-founder of InReach Ventures. ‘It was inefficient’, he says.”
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. Global 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, basic search, newsfeed,
getting messages.
Premium Services (subscription) include sending messages, chat, advanced search,
recommendations, business analytics, among others. For premium plan subscribers, we also
offer “Pay per Use” packages.
Pay per Use packages include extra in-mails and other features not yet available in our MVP.
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. CONFIDENTIAL MATERIAL; NOT TO BE DISTRIBUTED
Team Members
ChengXiang Zhai, PhD
Mentor / Advisor (& Future Partner)
Fernanda Torós, PhD
Founder / CEO
Patrick Gallagher
Software Engineer / Backend Developer
Pedro Richa Dabarian
CFO / Partner
Cassio R. Carvalho Oliveira
Head of Sales Brazil / Partner
Leonardo Bispo de Oliveira
Mentor / Software Engineer @ WeSpline via
Prototype.tech – Services include assisting with
infrastructure, backend, and product release
Romer Zandomingos Alves
Web Designer @ WeSpline via
Fator Criativo - Web design services
Carlos Andre S. Machado
Software Engineer / Backend Developer
13. CONFIDENTIAL MATERIAL; NOT TO BE DISTRIBUTED
Fernanda Torós, PhD – Founder & CEO
Dr Torós is Founding Partner & CEO at Sabra Capital. Previously, she was partner & portfolio manager at Oren Investimentos,
portfolio manager & 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 PhD in Economics & MS in Finance from UIUC, and BA and MA in Economics from PUC-Rio, Brazil.
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/.
Pedro Richa Dabarian – CFO / Partner
Previously: Partner & Risk/Compliance Officer at Sabra Capital, and Financial Analyst at Koin Latam. MBA in Investment
Management and BA in Industrial Engineering from PUC-Rio, Brazil, with credits obtained at California Polytechnic University.
Cassio R. Carvalho Oliveira – Head of Sales Brazil / Partner
Previously: Partner & 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. CONFIDENTIAL MATERIAL; NOT TO BE DISTRIBUTED
Leonardo Bispo de Oliveira – Software Engineer / Backend Developer
Founder at Prototype; Co-Founder/CTO at Notejuri. Previously: Co-Founder/Technical Leader at RockSpoon; Senior Software
Engineer at mbr targeting GmbH, VOIPFUTURE, and Orolix; Software Engineer at Cinq Technologies; Intern at HP; MS in
Distributed Systems and BS in Computer Science from PUC-Paraná, Brazil.
Romer Zandomingos Alves – Web Designer / Frontend Developer
Founder at Fator Criativo; UX Designer at Icatu Seguros. Previously: Web Designer at Petrobras; BS in Industrial Design from
UFRJ, Brazil.
.Carlos Andre S. Machado – Software Engineer / Backend Developer
Python/ Django Freelancer Developer; Software Quality Assurance Developer at Diebold Nixdorf; Previously: Software Web
Developer at m2agro; Python Developer at Finxi; Associate Degree in Computer Network from Unibratec, Brazil.
Patrick Gallagher – Software Engineer / Backend Developer
BS candidate in Computer Science, with a dual degree in Technological Entrepreneurship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign (UIUC). Co-Founder and Primary Developer of Fraktl.net. Course staff for UIUC's Software Design course.
Team Members
15. 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 2018)
16. CONFIDENTIAL MATERIAL; NOT TO BE DISTRIBUTED
Appendix – Financial Projection
US$ 200 K
Valuation: Facebook currently trades at EV/Sales = 14x. If Sales are US$ 926 mn at year 10
(2027) and we value WeSpline at a conservative EV/Sales = 10x, then our Enterprise Value
would be: EV = US$ 9.2 bn.
SENSITIVITY ANALYSIS - WESPLINE
share startups 67%
USD 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025 2026 2027
ASSUMPTIONS
AVERAGE # OF USERS PER TYPE OF COMPANY
corporations / enterprises 5
startups / innovative companies 2
non-core users 2
TOTAL # COMPANIES
corporations / enterprises - 264 792 3,168 15,312 38,280 95,040 160,512 223,080 278,784 324,720
startups / innovative companies - 536 1,608 6,432 31,088 77,720 192,960 325,888 452,920 566,016 659,280
growth rate 200% 300% 383% 150% 148% 69% 39% 25% 16%
core users (total) - annual average - 800 2,400 9,600 46,400 116,000 288,000 486,400 676,000 844,800 984,000
growth rate 500% 100% 383% 150% 148% 69% 39% 25%
non-core users (total) - annual average 200 500 3,000 6,000 29,000 72,500 180,000 304,000 422,500 528,000
TOTAL COMPANIES - 1,000 2,900 12,600 52,400 145,000 360,500 666,400 980,000 1,267,300 1,512,000
Engagement - PREMIUM SERVICES
% corporations engaged @ premium plan 0% 40% 50% 60% 65% 70% 75% 80% 80% 80%
# of users - - 1,584 7,920 45,936 124,410 332,640 601,920 892,320 1,115,136 1,298,880
rate per month - 24.00 24.00 24.00 24.00 24.00 24.00 24.00 24.00 24.00 24.00
rate per year - 288.00 288.00 288.00 288.00 288.00 288.00 288.00 288.00 288.00 288.00
% startups engaged @ premium plan 0% 40% 50% 60% 65% 70% 75% 80% 80% 80%
# of users - - 1,286 6,432 37,306 101,036 270,144 488,832 724,672 905,626 1,054,848
rate per month - 20.00 20.00 20.00 20.00 20.00 20.00 20.00 20.00 20.00 20.00
rate per year - 240.00 240.00 240.00 240.00 240.00 240.00 240.00 240.00 240.00 240.00
% non-core users engaged @ premium plan I 25% 50% 60% 65% 70% 75% 80% 80% 80%
# of users - - 250 3,000 7,200 37,700 101,500 270,000 486,400 676,000 844,800
rate per month - 15.00 15.00 15.00 15.00 15.00 15.00 15.00 15.00 15.00 15.00
rate per year - 180.00 180.00 180.00 180.00 180.00 180.00 180.00 180.00 180.00 180.00
TOTAL USERS ENGAGED - - 3,120 17,352 90,442 263,146 704,284 1,360,752 2,103,392 2,696,762 3,198,528
19. 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