CapitalIQ

Inspiration We built CapitalIQ in 24 hours, four people, four layers. We connected to Capital One's Nessie API for live accounts, transactions, and merchant data. On top of that, Claude AI classifies your life stage by reading spending signals the way a financial advisor would. A React dashboard surfaces your profile, spending breakdown, and personalized advice feed. The highlight is our real-time life event trigger one new transaction reclassifies your entire financial plan instantly. What We Learned The hardest part wasn't the AI, it was trust. Every insight had to be anchored to a real Nessie number. We also learned life stage is a spectrum, not a category, which pushed us toward confidence scoring over binary classification. Most importantly, we learned how to ship fast and cut ruthlessly. Challenges We Faced Our classifier was too brittle early on. High grocery spend doesn't always mean New Parent, so we layered multiple signals with confidence thresholds. Getting Claude to give specific advice instead of generic tips required grounding every prompt in real account balances. The real-time trigger loop was the hardest architectural challenge in the 24 hours. And we had to kill scope, Snowflake, ElevenLabs, Solana, all cut. A polished core beats five half-built features every time.

Built With

• anthropic
• claude
• nessie