by Riley Murdock
rmurdock@statenews.com
A development company composed of MSU students and an alumnus has won three East Lansing startup competitions since the beginning of November, netting $11,000 in funding among other resources. Their project, an application called Horizon, draws data from users’ social media usage and interests to create a personal travel profile for them. The app creates a travel itinerary for a specific destination or recommends places they might not have gone, Horizon CEO Oshan Weerasinghe said. Weerasinghe, an MSU alumnus, said he saw the need for the app with how much he had to travel for work. The app will ease a lot of decision making, Weerasinghe said.
“I travel a lot for work myself, and the idea for Horizon came directly out of this need that I had,” Weerasinghe said. “When I travel, I spend time deciding what I want to do next, where I want to eat, and I kind of scroll through on my phone or on multiple tabs on a browser trying to plan what I want to do next.”
In addition to using data from user’s social media to adapt its recommendations, Horizon will also adapt to user behavior the more it’s used, Weerasinghe said.
“Once you start using it ... kind of like a girlfriend, it gets to know you better,” Weerasinghe said.
Weerasinghe initially pitched the idea at Startup Weekend in November then teaming up with business sophomore Bailey Paxton and computer science sophomore Ben Buscarino, now CFO and CTO at Horizon, respectively. Later that month Horizon won Hatched, a monthly startup competition that provides $1,000 in funding to winners, in addition to resources such as interns and mentors. More recently, Horizon won The Hatch, a competition where the year’s Hatching winners pitch their ideas against each other for a further $10,000 in funding.
“Having an idea and just kind of toying with it in your head, at least in my experience, is kind of aggravating at times because you have no validation,” Weerasinghe said. “Getting some validation ... is always a great thing.”
The members of Horizon expressed excitement about the company’s quick start and are confident in the app’s future success.
“I think it’s truly revolutionary, because everyone’s working on how to save time, how to reduce the amount of decisions they have to make,” Buscarino said. “It’s going to be, I think, a huge consumer success when we actually really get it going and we really learn what other features people want with the application.”
Weerasinghe said Horizon now has enough funding and resources to enter a production phase and plans to apply to nationwide competitions, basing itself in Lansing and making use of MSU resources. The company plans to market itself to MSU once a working beta is finished.
