Ratyfi, Inc., a new early-stage startup dedicated to rating companies’ accountability, sustainability, and transparency, launched last Saturday. Their website ratyfi.com features an initial set of ratings of news outlets, and they plan to expand to rating other companies and industries.
Founded by three students Arnav Bhakta (CEO), William Yue (CTO), and Patrick Chen (COO), all at Phillips Academy Andover, Ratyfi was born out of an apparent lack of ability to find reliable information about a company’s full profile.
“We saw how much of a hassle it was to get all the information needed to get a full picture of a business, whether it be their sustainability or news reporting,” said Bhakta.
According to Yue, the current system for rating news outlets is based on five categories: Employee Satisfaction, Independence, Objectivity & Fact Checking, Quality of Sources, and User Experience. Each category has numerous subcategories, rated on their own scale out of 1 or 2. In the future, the company hopes to start using more tools such as machine learning Twitter sentiment analysis for a complete picture of a company and its impressions on others.
“We adapted some commonly accepted metrics for good journalism practice from the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics, then added two categories for two other crucial aspects for a good company: satisfaction for both users and employees. We hope to add similar ratings for other scales such as sustainability, for other companies such as Amazon, Google, Tesla, etc.” said Yue.
While Bhakta, Yue, and Chen initially built the site to be focused on only hand-crafted ratings, Yue realized that Ratyfi could expand its horizons to more rating systems about more companies. Since then, the idea has been evolving, with more focus on building a crowdsourced rating platform as the next update. When Ratyfi has a multitude of ratings about various aspects of many companies, Chen hopes that it will be the best place to find aggregate information about companies.
“I hope Ratyfi will be the go-to place for everyone to learn about every aspect of a business, whether they're considering ethical practices or investing. I hope there will also be a close, friendly community where people can share their experiences and opinions about these companies as well,” said Chen.
Bhakta echoed Chen’s thoughts, saying, “We hope to create a platform equivalent to the Wikipedia of Yelp, where anyone can go and have a fun time learning information and spreading knowledge. Additionally, we hope to transition into the fintech industry and use our ratings to provide a more accurate picture of how a company's stock is doing, but also create an environment where people can enjoy talking about their general sentiment for a company, their predictions for how it will perform, but most importantly, meet new people and create lasting memories.”
Media inquiries to:
Arnav Bhakta, CEO of Ratyfi, Inc.
arnav@ratyfi.com
