Announcing Genesis Program’s Investment in RapidDiligence
On behalf of the Genesis Program, I’m excited to announce our recent investment in RapidDiligence, a software-as-a-service platform to generate due diligence reports for buyers of web businesses.
The Problem
Tens of millions of dollars worth of web businesses, domains, and mobile apps are bought and sold on public marketplaces each year. Buyers research multiple metrics when valuing potential acquisitions, but finding and aggregating this data can take days if done manually by a human. These delays can quickly snowball and ruin a buyer’s ability to efficiently find great sites for purchase.
The Founder
Third-year UT Austin Computer Science major Ahmed Raza bought his first web business when he was still in high school, but quickly realized he had stumbled upon something big. According to Ahmed, plenty of web businesses sell great products but are often poorly managed from a day-to-day operations standpoint. Ahmed soon learned he had a knack for streamlining the back-end operations of these sites (like inventory management and distribution) and knew he wanted to become a bigger player in the space.
This year, Ahmed partnered with a former investment banker to raise money for a fund, Sitevestment, dedicated to buying and selling these online businesses. However, in order to be able to operate diligence on dozens of potential acquisitions, he realized the status quo of having to dig up metrics for sites by hand needed to change.
RapidDiligence
Ahmed hopes to develop an algorithm that will mine the necessary data for a diligence report using public APIs and databases. This software has the potential to reduce the diligence timeline from days to just minutes by reducing the involvement of the most inefficient part of the process: humans.
Some other players in the marketplace have tried to automate this process, but Ahmed believes their software lacks refinement and the perspective of their target market: high volume buyers of sites who need to run dozens of reports a year. Other competitors with higher quality reports rely heavily on employees to manually pull data, which makes the reports unrealistically expensive for users.
While Ahmed has coding experience, he is currently looking for developers to help him build out the RapidDiligence platform. Don’t hesitate to reach out to Ahmed if you’re interested!
Why I Led The Deal
Like many start-ups, RapidDiligence was born out of a frustration with the status quo. When I talked with Ahmed, it was clear he had a great perspective on what diligence reporting software should look like and why current offerings just don’t measure up. The Genesis Program is confident in his ability to leverage his deep knowledge of this space to create an awesome platform and streamline the diligence process for site buyers everywhere!
I’m thrilled to work with Ahmed while he develops RapidDiligence and can’t wait to see his success.
The Genesis Program helps students turn their ideas into reality by providing access to funding and mentorship. We are a student-run fund that invests in ventures at the University of Texas at Austin
