Who Will Support My Project? Interactive Search of Potential Crowdfunding Investors Through InSearch

TL;DR

This paper introduces inSearch, a visual analytic system that uses Graph Neural Networks to help crowdfunding founders interactively identify and explore potential investors, improving trust and decision-making.

Contribution

The paper presents inSearch, a novel interactive system combining visualization and Graph Neural Networks to assist founders in finding and understanding potential investors.

Findings

Effective overview of potential investors achieved

Interactive exploration of investor behavior enabled

System supports better investor-founder matching

Abstract

Crowdfunding provides project founders with a convenient way to reach online investors. However, it is challenging for founders to find the most potential investors and successfully raise money for their projects on crowdfunding platforms. A few machine learning based methods have been proposed to recommend investors' interest in a specific crowdfunding project, but they fail to provide project founders with explanations in detail for these recommendations, thereby leading to an erosion of trust in predicted investors. To help crowdfunding founders find truly interested investors, we conducted semi-structured interviews with four crowdfunding experts and presents inSearch, a visual analytic system. inSearch allows founders to search for investors interactively on crowdfunding platforms. It supports an effective overview of potential investors by leveraging a Graph Neural Network to model investor preferences. Besides, it enables interactive exploration and comparison of the temporal evolution of different investors' investment details.