Director of the DC Youth Corps Wins VISA Hackathon

We are excited that our very own Mike Nabil, the Director of the DC Youth Corps, won the grand prize of $10,000 at the VISA sponsored hackathon!
Last month, our partners at D.C. Department of Small and Local Business Development (DSLBD) notified us that the U.S. Small Business Administration was planning the National Small Business Week, a nationwide series of events aimed to encourage and support small businesses in the United States.
Among the events was the VISA hackathon held at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C. on April 27-29. A total of 65 local app developers, business owners and entrepreneurs participated, all in competition for a total prize pool of $24,000. The participants were asked to use APIs from the U.S. Government and VISA Developer Platform and build tools to help small businesses grow and work more efficiently.
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​The winners, Team Hermyz, were lead to success by Mike Nabil. Mike represented FutureFIRST and took home the grand prize of ten thousand dollars ($10,000). The winning app which they built, Hermyz, is a bot that enables small businesses to manage and pay invoices using the VISA Direct API, which eliminates the need for inefficient paper-based processes. Team Hermyz also included Christopher Phillips, Sandro Guraspasvili, Zach Bauer and Mohamed Elkarim.
Mike explained the idea behind creating team Hermyz: “Being on the leadership team of a small business, I understand first hand how hard it is for small businesses to keep track of their invoices. Late or overdue payments may lead to penalties, credit damage, or loss of providers. The biggest challenge for any startup idea is adoption: convincing a team to use the new platform. We realized that many small businesses and startups use Slack for team management. So, we decided to build a tool based on the Slack platform which is adopted by small businesses and startups. Building a Slack bot meant building a tool accessible to the 6 million users who use Slack every day”.
PYMNTS.com, covered the hackathon and interviewed Team Hermyz and said:

​“As the winner of a $10,000 grand prize and the support of a major payments technology company, Hermyz joins a growing community of disruptors and innovators addressing a multitude of problems in corporate payments and financial management today.”
– Source: VISA’s Hackathon Winner, Hermyz, Takes B2B Payments Inspiration From Slack

At FutureFITRST, we hire the best talent in our community and aim to provide the best educational experience to our students. We believe that education and entrepreneurship are the only ways for our communities to prosper. If you are interested in joining our team, please contact us here. If you are interested in joining one of our programs, please apply here!