If Tempest Insights emerges victorious at today’s VeloCity Fund Finals in Waterloo, CEO Jack Gao said he’ll use the cash to hire new employees and buy expensive real estate developer data sets.
Tempest Insights, currently a startup out of the Next 36 accelerator in Toronto, helps real estate developers choose what type of building to build and how to price them. Currently, many developers manually scroll through enormous Excel spreadsheets to do crucial market analysis, or they spend tens of thousands of dollars on expensive consultants. Tempest automatically imports the data and generate state-of-the-art statistical models for rapid and accurate analysis.
Gao said the startup provides two main services to help real estate developers: they aggregate public and private data by searching for data sets and collecting them in one location, as well as providing powerful visualization tools on top of those data sets. Real estate developers can do market research- demographics, economics, all that’s needed to build a report- and they get to do it in one location.
Currently real estate developers could use a hand, and Gao said the company starts by requesting a sample of a market report. “Then we tailor a system to mimic the structure of their report, and we can show them instantly the same report , but without costing thousands of dollars. They get pretty excited.”
The company was only founded in May, out of the Next 36, and will pitch to the accelerator’s Venture Day on August 12. After that it’ll move back to Waterloo, where Gao and the team are from, and settle in at Communitech.
Today though it’s all about the VeloCity Fund Final pitch, where nine other startups will compete for four different $25,000 cheques. Wouldn’t it be nice to have that money.