B.

Tech Project Evaluation 2 – Development of a Growth-Aware AI Marketplace for Startups

(Rubric #R2)

Ai-powered marketplaces for startups

Presented by : Under the Supervision of :-

Ananya Tyagi , 2022433429 Name of the Faculty: Mr. Jitendra Singh

Hani Kumar , 2022431320 Designation: Asst. professor
Rahul Kumar , 2022443216 Department: Computer Science & Engineering

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE & ENGINEERING

SHARDA SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY
April 2025
APPROVAL FROM GUIDE FOR THE
EVALUATION

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 CONTENTS OF THE
PRESENTATION
1. Introduction & Motivation
2. Project Objectives
3. Feasibility Analysis
4. Identifying Key Constraints
5. Project Requirement Specification
6. Methodology
7. Mathematical Model (Formulas)
8. Pseudocode – GrowthAwareHybridRec
9. Fulfillment of Responsibilities
[Link] & Future Work
11. References
12.Q&A and Feedback

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 Proposed AI Marketplace Workflow

⚠ Insert Flowchart Image Here (export .drawio as PNG/JPG first)

 Introduction & Motivation
The Problem: Startups today struggle to break through due to multiple
barriers.
• Visibility Gap: New ventures find it difficult to reach the right
audience, mentors, and investors.
• Funding Challenges: Securing early-stage capital remains complex
and highly competitive.
• Scalability Issues: Even promising startups fail to grow due to a lack
of targeted support and efficient networking.

The Need: There is an urgent need for a growth-aware, AI-powered

platform that enables smarter matchmaking, personalized discovery, and
actionable insights—helping startups not just survive but truly scale.

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 Project Objectives
• Develop a Growth-Aware Hybrid Recommendation System (GAHRS):
Design an AI-driven engine that combines collaborative filtering, content-
based methods, and predictive analytics to recommend meaningful
connections.
• Enable Personalized Startup Ecosystem Connections: Facilitate tailored
matchmaking between startups, investors, mentors, and customers to
maximize growth opportunities.
• Ensure Fairness with Accuracy: Strike a balance between promoting
underrepresented or early-stage startups (fairness) and delivering precise,
satisfaction-driven recommendations (accuracy).
• Integrate Recommendation + Predictive Intelligence: Combine
traditional recommendation engines with predictive growth models to
anticipate startup needs and scale effectively.

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 Feasibility Analysis
Technical Feasibility
• Validated AI/ML methods (CF, CB, NLP, Predictive Analytics).
• Hybrid recommender approach backed by research.
• Availability of startup–investor datasets.
Economic Feasibility
• Open-source tools minimize cost.
• Cloud-native deployment ensures scalability.
• Lightweight architecture reduces resource needs.
Operational Feasibility
• Skilled team in Python, ML, cloud, and full-stack dev.
• Established data preprocessing & deployment pipeline.
• Capable of scaling with ecosystem growth.

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 Identifying Key Constraints
Data Constraints
– Limited availability of high-quality startup–investor datasets.
– Requires continuous enrichment and validation for accuracy.

Bias Constraints
– Algorithms may favor well-funded or visible startups.
– Fairness-aware mechanisms needed to ensure equal opportunity.

Economic Constraints
– Cloud hosting and infrastructure scaling can be costly.
– Optimization required for computation, storage, and deployment.

Technical Constraints
– Integration of multiple recommendation models adds complexity.
– Continuous retraining needed to address model drift.
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 Project Requirement Specification
Functional Requirements:
• A web platform for startups, investors, mentors, and customers.
• The system shall provide AI-powered matchmaking and personalized
recommendations.
• The system shall support secure authentication and role-based access
Technical & Data Specifications:
• Dataset: Alibaba Tianchi dataset and synthetic startup dataset
• Preprocessing:
o Feature engineering (funding stage, traction score, market category)
o normalization of numerical values
o encoding of categorical attributes.
• Model:
o Architecture: Growth-Aware Hybrid

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 Methodology
Our approach integrates Collaborative and Content-Based Filtering with Growth Stage
Index, followed by hybrid scoring and re-ranking to deliver precise, context-aware
recommendations.

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 Pseudocode – GrowthAwareHybridRec
• Algorithm: GrowthAwareHybridRec
Input: StartupData, InvestorData, HistoricalInteractions
Output: RankedRecommendations
BEGIN

1. Load dataset
2. Clean column names
3. Encode categorical columns to numeric
4. Convert investor funding ranges to numeric
5. Prepare features (X) and targets (y) for:
a. Investor matchmaking
b. Startup success prediction
6. Split data into training and testing sets
7. Train models:
a. RandomForest → Investor prediction
b. XGBoost → Startup success prediction
8. Evaluate models on test data
9. Predict for new startup:
a. Recommend Investor
b. Predict Success (1=Yes, 0=No)
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END
Fulfillment of Responsibilities
Member Contributions
Hani Kumar • Led the literature review and problem formulation .
• Contributed to the design of the AI marketplace architecture and its
conceptual framework .
• Authored sections on the future scope, including explainable AI
Rahul Singh Conducted system analysis and concept modeling to illustrate how
platforms empower startups .
• Wrote about the key benefits of AI marketplaces, such as real-time
insights and faster time-to-market .
• Focused on the challenges and limitations, including data
dependencies, infrastructure needs, and regulatory hurdles.
Ananya Tyagi • Provided insights on the practical applications of AI, such as smart
product recommendations and investor matching .
• Developed and detailed the case studies that highlight the
measurable impact of AI in various startups .
• Contributed to the conclusion, summarizing the paper's findings and
the importance of AI marketplaces for startup growth

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 Conclusion & Future Work
• Developed a lightweight and accurate system with Explainable AI
(XAI).
• Can expand to multilingual platforms to increase accessibility and
user engagement.
• Implements Reinforcement Learning for adaptive and optimized
recommendations.
• Supports No-code/Low-code AI for rapid deployment in resource-
constrained environments.
• Feasibility and robustness validated → ensures high accuracy,
fairness, and scalability.
• Future research: enhance multimodal detection using audio-visual
analysis and advanced data preprocessing.

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 References
• Adomavicius, G., & Tuzhilin, A. (2005). Toward the next generation of recommender systems: A survey of the state-of-the-art and possible extensions. MIS
Quarterly, 29(4), 657–672.
• Schafer, J. B., Frankowski, D., Herlocker, J., & Sen, S. (2007). Collaborative filtering recommender systems. In P. Brusilovsky, A. Kobsa, & W. Nejdl (Eds.), The
Adaptive Web (pp. 291–324). Springer.
• Koren, Y., Bell, R., & Volinsky, C. (2009). Matrix factorization techniques for recommender systems. IEEE Computer, 42(8), 30–37.
• Herlocker, J., Konstan, J., Terveen, L., & Riedl, J. (2004). Evaluating collaborative filtering recommender systems. ACM Transactions on Information Systems,
22(1), 5–53.
• Bobadilla, J., Ortega, F., Hernando, A., & Gutiérrez, A. (2013). Recommender systems survey. Knowledge-Based Systems, 46, 109–132.
• Zhang, Q. (2021). Artificial intelligence in recommender systems. Cognitive Computation, 13(2), 314–329.
• Chen, P. Y., & Wu, S. Y. (2008). Algorithms for profit-aware recommender systems. ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, 8(4), Article 18.
• Li, J., He, X., & Zhang, H. (2017). Deep learning for recommender systems: A survey. ACM Computing Surveys, 50(1), Article 5.
• Roy, S., Dutta, S., & Paul, S. (2022). A systematic review and research perspective on recommender systems. Journal of Big Data, 9, Article 25.
• Shani, G., & Gunawardana, A. (2005). Evaluating recommendation systems. In F. Ricci, L. Rokach, & B. Shapira (Eds.), Handbook of Recommender Systems.
Springer. (Page numbers and DOI missing)
• Savai, S., et al. (2023). Benchmarking recommendation engine techniques on large-scale datasets. ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems,
14(2), Article 10.
• Necula, S.-C., et al. (2023). AI-driven recommendations: A systematic review of the state of the art in e-commerce. Electronic Commerce Research and
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• Li, Y., Wang, T., & Zhang, X. (2024). Recommending for a multi-sided marketplace: A multi-objective hierarchical approach. Marketing
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• Bobadilla, J., Gutiérrez, A., & Ortega, F. (2012). A collaborative filtering predictive model for recommendations in multimedia systems. Multimedia Tools
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• Wang, F., et al. (2023). Context representation in recommender systems. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. (Volume/issue/page/doi
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Q&A and Feedback

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