One Swipe to a Startup: Perm Students Build Social Network Finda
The service helps users find friends, project partners and even build close relationships. For now, the app operates within Perm Polytechnic, but its developers plan to expand it to universities across the region and eventually across Russia.
Something interesting emerged at Perm Polytechnic University. Inside the university’s navigation mini-app Helper, students were actively looking for more than classrooms and directions. They were also looking for people to connect with. Demand for an in-university matching feature became too high to ignore. Although Helper itself had to be shut down, its developers realized there was no shared space where students from different faculties, let alone different universities, could find one another based on common interests. That became the idea behind Finda.
Find Your People
Two people are currently working on the project: Artyom Peremitin, a student at Perm National Research Polytechnic University (PNRPU), and his colleague Maksim Makarov from the College of Industrial and Information Technologies. The app currently operates only within PNRPU, but the plan is to first reach universities across Perm Krai, then expand nationwide and eventually abroad.
Finda works much like dating apps. Users create profiles, list their interests and browse other users’ profiles. Swipe right means a like; swipe left means pass. But a match is only the beginning. The real goal is to find like-minded people for joint projects, research or simply friendship. Developer Artyom Peremitin says this turns meeting people “from something superficial into something meaningful.”
AI Face Check
The developers understand that in a student community, hobbies are only part of what matters. A person’s field of study, participation in competitions and even career ambitions can all carry weight. That is why the team is working to improve how Finda matches people. In the future, the developers plan to build their own neural network to serve as a digital assistant. It is intended to help users not only meet people but also navigate academic matters and keep up with current university events.
For the time being, every profile and every photo is checked with the help of AI systems to keep the community safe.
Opposites Don’t Attract
Before Finda, several Russian projects had explored similar ideas. In 2022, specialists at ITMO University announced Exclusive, a service built around AI that searches for people with unique competencies. Its approach was the reverse: instead of a student looking for a team, the system finds a person for a specific task, effectively taking on part of a recruiter’s role. The project showed that technologies for “smart people search” were emerging as a field in their own right.
That same year, the Moscow's Higher School of Economics (HSE) launched a networking bot for its employees. The algorithm automatically matched people with similar professional interests and suggested that they connect.
In 2023, HSE students introduced HiBye. It addressed a narrower need, helping users find useful contacts at events, exhibitions and forums. That same year, Perm Polytechnic, in a particularly fitting development, created a platform for finding scientists and research partners. The system analyzed publications and research activity. Finda, then, is a continuation of the same trend, but with a focus not just on scientists, but on students as a whole.
Bringing It Together
Universities are increasingly looking for ways to keep students within their information ecosystems, help them adapt and find their own path. That gives Finda the potential to grow into a nationwide network over time. With further development and features for data analysis and neural-network-based recommendations, the system could match users not just with someone to talk to, but with a research co-author or a startup partner based on their academic profile and achievements.
Taking Finda international would be more complicated, but it is possible. Students around the world face similar challenges when it comes to finding contacts, teams and friends. Finda would, however, have to address data-protection and localization requirements before expanding abroad. Even so, the direction is clear. Students could end up with more than a scheduling assistant: they could have a personal networking aide for both professional and personal connections.
