✨ Sift: The Universal Startup Validator

Bring your startup. We'll tell you the truth in 10 seconds.

Sift is a lightning-fast, highly dynamic startup validator designed to bridge the gap between founders and venture capital. Simply drop a pitch deck, and Sift instantly evaluates it against core VC pillars, generates a structured readiness score, and launches an interactive AI Co-Pilot to help you fix the critical gaps standing between you and a term sheet.

Built with a premium, glassmorphism design system, Sift strips away the noise to focus entirely on actionable, brutal, and productive feedback.

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🚀 Key Features

• Universal Ingestion: Drag and drop a .pdf or .pptx deck, paste a website or GitHub URL, or just type out your raw idea. Sift handles the rest.
• The VC Radar Chart: Go beyond a simple score. Sift visually indexes your startup across 5 core VC pillars (Market, Execution, Moat, Team-Product, and Economics) using an interactive Radar Chart.
• Instant Actionable Feedback: The moment your evaluation completes, Sift Co-Pilot proactively identifies your #1 critical gap and immediately offers a concrete rewrite for that specific slide.
• Fluid & Premium UI: Enjoy a frictionless experience with dynamic micro-animations, optimistic loading states, and a beautiful HSL dark-mode aesthetic.
• BYO-Key Support: Use Sift's default local inference, or supply your own API key for maximum power.

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🏗️ Architecture & Stack

Sift is a lightweight React frontend backed by a robust Python FastAPI intelligence layer.

Layer	Technology Stack
Frontend	React 18, TypeScript, Vite, Vanilla CSS, Recharts
Backend	FastAPI, Uvicorn, SQLite
Model Router	Groq, Anthropic, OpenAI, Cerebras, OpenRouter, Gemini, Ollama
Local RAG	ChromaDB, SentenceTransformers

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⚡ Quick Start (Local Development)

Get Sift running locally in minutes:

git clone git@github.com:saimihirj/Sift.git
cd Sift

# 1. Start the Backend Intelligence Layer
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
uvicorn backend.main:app --host 127.0.0.1 --port 8000 --reload

# 2. Start the Frontend Application
npm --prefix frontend install
npm --prefix frontend run dev

The frontend will be instantly available at http://localhost:5173.

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🌍 Deployment

Frontend (Vercel)

1. Connect the repository to Vercel.
2. Set Framework Preset to Vite.
3. Add the VITE_API_BASE_URL environment variable pointing to your deployed backend.

Backend (Render/Railway)

1. Connect the repository to your host.
2. Build command: pip install -r requirements.txt
3. Start command: uvicorn backend.main:app --host 0.0.0.0 --port $PORT

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📄 License

Proprietary. All rights reserved.