Choosing the right stocks is more than a guessing game, it’s strategy. Cappio, a freshly-formed startup created by two Georgia Tech students, is easing the investment decision-making process with their easy-to-use research tools. Hype recently got the scoop from co-founder, Chintan Parikh on how they’re changing the game of investments with their financial reporting platform.
Parikh works alongside co-founder Jay Deuskar, a Georgia Tech student who received the very prestigious President’s Scholarship – awarded to the top 1% of the incoming class. Deuskar, avid iOS developer taking on projects like Nimbus, decided to take a leave of absence from school to focus full-time at startup Insightpool and take on the role of CEO of Cappio. Deuskar’s expertise matched with Parikh’s eleven years in programming – not to mention features on CNN, Business Insider, Forbes, Quartz magazine, and Hype – make Cappio an unstoppable force. If you’re as exhausted as we are with the accomplishments of this duo, try to keep up for the rest of the Q&A.
Your Pitch:
Cappio is an online platform that enables retail investors to better understand the investments they are making. Our platform takes publicly available financial data on U.S. stocks, analyzes it, and outputs an easy to understand report explaining what the company does, how it’s performing, and whether it makes sense to invest in the stock.
What problem are you solving?
Investment research presents a huge barrier to entry to anyone wanting to start investing in the stock market. The investment research process is time consuming and requires specialized knowledge. Tools like Yahoo! Finance and Morningstar all present the data, but unless you know how to properly analyze a company, you will most likely lose money.
Please describe the market/industry impact:
We want to make investing accessible to the regular people again. We think with the proper tools and analysis, investors can pick fundamentally strong companies that will grow over time and provide stable returns that outperform the market.
Revenue Model:
We’re looking into white labeling our platform to small to midsize wealth managers as a portal where clients can conduct research and really understand their advisor’s strategies.
How’d you get the idea for it?
When we started investing, we noticed how steep of a learning curve investing presents for the regular person with no financial expertise. So we started talking to as many as individual investors as we could find to learn about their behaviors and pain points. 400 interviews later, we decided to start building the early version of Cappio.
Who are your competitors and how do you stand out?
There’s the status quo of course, sites like Yahoo Finance, Google Finance, etc. Cappio aims to add context around the raw data those sites provide so we can help less experienced investors understand the information.
There are some new competitors popping up in the space but we think our focus on providing a clear, easy to understand experience is what sets us apart.
How does ATL weave into your story?
We’ve both been involved with the Atlanta start up community since our freshmen year and we’re loving see it grow. Chintan founded Startup Exchange and it sparked a lot of the entrepreneurial movement we’re seeing at GT today. The one thing we noticed was that Atlanta has a heavy focus on B2B startups and we wanted to make sure we brought a consumer tool like Cappio into the mix in Atlanta.
Follow Cappio:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/teamcappio
Twitter: https://twitter.com/teamcappio
