A young DePaul company is making waves in the startup community. Hashtagr (hashtagr.co), the search engine explicitly for hashtags, aggregates posts from social media platforms like Twitter, Tumblr, Vine, and more into one simple user interface. In a field of many startups, they managed to win Microsoft’s Imagine Cup national title in innovation.
“Imagine Cup is the world’s largest student technology competition,” Murat Berme, program manager for Microsoft Ventures as well as a coach and mentor to the Hashtagr team, said.
Imagine Cup served as the culminating competition to Imagine Fund, which began in February and ended in April with the Imagine Cup presentations.
“Imagine Fund was an effort to take student technology teams and provide them with skills that are most relevant for actually taking that technology to market,” Berme said.
“The Microsoft imagine cup is without a doubt one of the most rewarding experiences of my life that has helped my team and I grow both personally and professionally,” Khoa Nguyen, a DePaul senior and Hashtagr chief executive officer, said. “Although at times stressful, Hashtagr would not be where it is today without the program.”
The team’s success at Imagine Cup didn’t hurt when they applied and were granted a spot in Microsoft’s highly regarded Idea Camp.
The Idea Camp program, run by Microsoft’s venture capital arm Microsoft Ventures, flew the Hashtagr team to Microsoft’s Redmond campus in Seattle and provided Hashtagr with business, technical and design mentors.
The team of students collected many wins in 2013, ranking as finalists at startup competitions at University of Illinois at Chicago, DePaul, and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, as well as racking up more than $22,000 in prize money.
Recently, they also won a year’s worth of office space in Merchandise Mart at Chicago’s preeminent entrepreneurship hub, 1871. This came as a result of Hashtagr taking the grand prize for the 1871’s Chicago College Startup Competition.
“1871’s strength lies in its community,” Nguyen said. “You have some of the smartest people in Chicago, as well as experienced entrepreneurs working right next to you. Thus, we expect to use 1871’s space not only to work on our product, but to network and acquire mentorship.”
With so much excitement and success around the company, the humble founding story may come as a surprise.
“Hashtagr came when Dennis and I were discussing doing another startup in the spring of 2013,” Nguyen said. “We have had two failed ones in the past, and we were debating doing another startup during the summer or looking for internships. We had noticed the rise of hashtag usage, and Dennis threw out the idea of a hashtag search engine during one of our brainstorming sessions and it stuck.”
As for the future, Nguyen hopes to continue trending upward. “We hope to capitalize on our recent successes and increase our user base. On a grander scale, we hope people will think of Hashtagr the next time they see a hashtag.”
In addition to Nguyen, the Hashtagr team comprises University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign senior Saagar Gupta as chief Marketing officer, Dennis Leancu as chief technology officer, respectively, and DePaul HCI Masters student Dheeru Pennepalli as the designer.
