At the end of September, four students of TalTech's Cyber Security Engineering programme did a clean job at the Digital Construction hackathon organized by Garage48, winning a total of 7,000 euros for their idea and access to a new hackathon in Copenhagen to develop into a new start-up.
According to team leader and IT student Anton Vishnevsky, their Procyon team created a tool to help predict property value by visualizing data such as price per square meter, energy efficiency, carbon footprint, air quality and crime rate. Other sources of information included, for example, district development plans. Vishnevsky said that the aim of the solution is to create value for various parties in the real estate sector: primarily brokers, developers, but also ordinary buyers and sellers, investors, banks, and urban planners.
The team leader noted that they did not have high expectations when they went to the hackathon: “When we enrolled the hackathon we actually had no idea at all, all we wanted was to have free food and drinks and just to code something. In the first part various mentors helped us to polish out the vision of the future product, so we could focus on implementation and data aspect was looking attractive for us as for the team full of software engineers," Vishnevsky commented.
In total, Procyon won three awards: 3,000 euros from Riigi Kinnisvara, 4,000 euros from the Finnish Ministry of the Environment and a ticket to Copenhagen to continue working on the AEC BLOXHUB hackathon at the end of October, were they are looking to create a unique product proposition to the market.
The team is currently preparing for the upcoming hacking party in Denmark, where in addition to Vishnevsky, his teammates cyber defense students Alexandrs Rimlins, Denis Shadrin and Nicoleta Petrea will go. In addition, Leonards Tesnovs and Liisi Karindi, a member of the board of the business and communication side of Procyon, who supported the validation of the idea and with the presentation needed to win.