How did you find your time at Katapult?

It has truly been a great experience working at Katapult for the last 10 weeks – far beyond any expectations. We were very lucky that our projects were tailor made for our field of study, so that we could challenge ourselves within business analytics. All the team members at Katapult were so welcoming and helpful, and I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to be a part of this amazing team.

What project did you work on?

My project was the mapping of the Impact Investment Network, where the objective was to investigate the existing social networks within the impact investment space using concepts from graph theory. After collecting a lot of data, I created two networks; one for startups and one for investors. The startups network provided a lot of information regarding geographical locations, the most dominating sectors, how the startups form clusters, and which of the startups in Katapult’s portfolio are the most influential. 

The investor network gave a lot of insights in terms of which investors share the same values as Katapult, and I was able to visualize and animate how the impact investing community has changed over time. From this graph, we could see that impact investing has grown exponentially in the last 3-4 years. 

There are so many possibilities when it comes to creating these types of networks, and it can aid Katapult in terms of market insights, their position within the impact investment space, and how their influence is helping make Impact Investment mainstream and we can analyze the timeline to see how these things have changed over time and what we can expect in the future.

What will you take away from your experience at Katapult?

I have learned so much throughout my internship at Katapult, and I have met so many incredible and talented people. Climate change is the biggest challenge that we are facing. Luckily, there are startups all over the world doing amazing work to help save our planet. I have become much more impact-aware after my time at Katapult, and I will definitely take that with me, not just in my career, but also in my personal life. I have great respect for all the work that Katapult is doing. 

How did you find your time at Katapult?

My time here has been amazing! So many great people are working towards the same goal of profit because of impact. This is inspiring and has given me more hope for the future! I have learned so much more than I expected, both on a personal level and professionally. Katapult welcomed us with open arms and has always been there to guide and help us on our projects. After my time here at Katapult, I recommend everybody take an internship.

What project did you work on?

My project was based on testing different scenarios and business decisions on Katapult’s deal flow. The deal flow starts with around 2000 start-ups and ends with 20 incredible impact-driven companies. If Katapult has one or two deal flows a year, it’s hard to test different scenarios and allocations of their resources. This would take a lot of time, resources, and the costs would be immense. This is why I decided to make a simulation of their deal flow. 

In this simulation, they can test how the deal flow would be affected if they change allocated resources, got more leads into the deal-flow than expected, or a virus like covid hit again. What’s great about the simulation is that they can test out a million different scenarios in a matter of minutes and then optimize their decisions to make the best quality screening possible.

What will you take away from your experience at Katapult?

I have become more confident in myself, especially when it comes to presenting in front of important stakeholders. My structure has also improved from starting a project without any baseline to a finished product. 

I have also started looking at impact and sustainability in a new light. Working for Katapult has given me a lot of great stories of different start-ups trying to make this world a better place. 

How did you find your time at Katapult?

Katapult has been very welcoming since the first day of my internship here and over the 10 weeks, it definitely helped me streamline my focus area and refine my skills with incredible guidance and support from everyone at Katapult.  The time at Katapult was filled with learning, insightful discussion, fun, an amazing office view, great lunches and great people. I will cherish them all. 

What project did you work on?

My project was to analyze the impact metrics framework and visualize it through the use of an impact dashboard.

Over the 10 weeks, I worked to develop a dashboard that visualizes the impact of all the portfolio companies. This interactive dashboard can be used to view the impact metrics based on various categories and timeframes. Also a real-time report can be exported from this dashboard of the desired data categories. 

I believe this dashboard would provide a central tool for Katpult in showcasing its impact to all its stakeholders. This dashboard will help Katapult keep track of their impact metrics and even set goals for the future. The metrics monitoring gives the opportunity to make strategies and business decisions to grow even more and make more impact investments.

What will you take away from your experience at Katapult?

The time at Katapult has been one of the best learning experiences I have ever had. The most impressive fact was that I had the freedom to go up to anyone and ask even the silliest of my doubts, without any hesitation. The thing that I believe would stay with me further in my life is the impact driven mindset. I will be mindful of having a positive impact, so as to make the world a better place to live in.

How did you find your time at Katapult?

To be honest, my time at Katapult exceeded all my expectations. First of all, the projects I worked on were highly relevant to what I was studying in my Master’s studies. They were also spot on with what I hope to work on in my professional career. Also, every employee in the company was very professional, focused, and driven by their work, which definitely rubbed off on me as well. The people were the main reason I enjoyed this internship to the large extent that I did. Every day was fun and motivating as it provided me with new stuff to learn. I have learned more than I could possibly imagine, and I had so much fun with all the great people working here! 

What project did you work on?

For my internship I worked on two different projects. The first project was aimed at building a Deal-flow Application Form Analysis tool. The main objective of this tool revolved around building a machine learning model that would classify the applications to their relevant deal-flow. This, together with the rest of the tool, would enable Katapult to better understand the companies in the submission form and also compare the companies to then have a stronger foundation for making decisions going forward. I wanted to make this tool easily accessible for every member of Katapult to use when necessary. My solution therefore became creating a user friendly application available for every employee of Katapult. My solution-tool is called M.A.G.N.U.S. which is an acronym for: Maybe A Generally Needed User System. I believe M.A.G.N.U.S. will benefit Katapult as it would ease their workload, make a better use of resources, and strengthen their decision-making foundation. 

My second project aimed at building a machine learning algorithm that would predict the probability of an investor participating in a Katapult event, and the expected number of future participations. With this tool they can predict attendance to events such as Katapult Future Fest among other applications. This tool was also included as a part of the M.A.G.N.U.S. app.  I strongly believe this tool will save Katapult a lot of time and resources. With this tool the team can also target efforts more efficiently and optimize the allocation of their resources in order to execute the actions with the highest potential value for Katapult. Hopefully this will make Katapult’s life much easier going forward!

What will you take away from your experience at Katapult?

The first thing I will take with me from this internship is that I have become much more impact aware and impact driven. This is something I will carry with me throughout my professional career and my personal life. This internship has taught me extremely much about Python and coding, but also about business and how the workflow in a company actually works. I will definitely remember all the great co-workers here and the way they conduct themselves at work. The people here have been amazingly nice and helpful and been there to guide and assist us in all aspects of the internship. I have also made friends for life here, and evolved as a person as well. I want to thank Katapult for these amazing weeks, and I can’t recommend Katapult enough to future potential interns! 

A verbatim from Humberto, AI & Data Analytics manager at Katapult.

We have been very fortunate to have these four remarkable impact interns at Katapult’s Data Analytics team during the late summer and autumn. 

Through their projects, Erick, Sanne, Juyin, and Joachim showcased outstanding skills, professionalism, work ethics, and passion for making a difference in allocating capital for good. 

Their substantial contribution allows us to expand on new frontiers. They have set the baseline to help us better understand the Impact investing space and the inner workings of our business. These projects also allow us to deploy tools that increase our efficiency and effectiveness at doing what we know best: selecting and investing in the best impact-tech startups.

Our impact intern program was carefully crafted to benefit the business and provide excellent learning outcomes relevant to their specific academic programs. Just like they had a very positive impact on Katapult, we are happy to know that we were able to impact their professional development and complement their academic learning with real-life work experience. 

We wish the very best for the remaining of their academic pursuits and great success in their promising careers. Furthermore, we hope that the impact awareness they learned from Katapult trickles down on their future ventures.! 

Sanne, Juyin, Joachim, and Erik, Thank you very much!