Thanks to our F100 Growth Fund in partnership with Sky, seven Black-owned businesses received funding in 2022. We asked some of our 2022 winners to share their journey to their businesses and how they found the F100 Growth Fund experience.
Read Samuel from Nestwork’s story.
My name is Samuel Ola and I’m the co-founder and CPO at Nestwork. Alongside building Nestwork, I am a student at Loughborough University and in 2022 I was named the Undergraduate of the Year by Targetjobs and Sky.
Nestwork is a careers social network for students. Our platform uses peer-to-peer learning to help students secure their dream jobs by matching them to career communities and allowing them to ask questions directly to employers.
I’ve always been entrepreneurial, since my days of selling sweets and drinks at school. In fact, this is the second tech startup I’ve built to date. The idea for Nestwork came from a shared frustration that my co-founders and I felt. As students ourselves, we felt traditional career education was highly ineffective. Current solutions either aren’t built for students, have a poor user experience, or don’t leverage peer-to-peer learning. Nestwork aims to make career education simple, scalable, effective and social.
A friend sent over the details and I knew I had to apply!
It was perfect for the stage we were at. We had an idea that was developing and we were in desperate need of a network of experts and like-minded founders to keep us accountable and help us get to our next stage. For us, our next stage was launching our MVP and becoming investment ready and we knew the £15k grant on offer would help us get there.
I really enjoyed the demo day because it was the first in-person demo day I have ever done. I’m used to virtual demo days where I could rely on having notes by my screen, but this time I was forced to memorize a compelling pitch. This made me more confident going into future fundraising pitches as I had perfected the narrative for Nestwork, and this definitely contributed to our recent fundraising success.
Nestwork benefitted massively from joining this programme. Firstly, we met 2 of our current angel investors through the programme, and they’ve both helped us reach a wider network of angels and VC’s, so it’s really been a snowball effect.
Secondly, I got the opportunity to connect with an incredible group of founders in my F100 accountability group, I’m still in contact with them today and I’m able to bounce ideas with them.
Finally, the grant funding was super helpful in helping us to finish our MVP and develop the product, but the confidence it gave us that other people believe in our vision was equally valuable! Additionally, the BEO team recently introduced us to a potential new client, so the value of the programme has been game-changing.
You miss every shot you don’t take. Even if you don’t think you’re ready, or that you won’t be successful in getting in or winning the grant, you learn something valuable from every opportunity like this.
