If there is someone you would like to add to the list, please email us directly. Please see our shortlist below!
Jake Fox – Paperound
In 2021, serial tech entrepreneur Jake Fox founded Paperound, a digital marketplace for busy founders to delegate company tasks to UK students, on-demand. As a student at Lancaster University and then University of Bradford between 2013-2018, Jake was passionate about getting involved in and learning from small businesses – but without established networks or connections he had no way of getting relevant, paid experience during his degree.
In his post-graduate career, Jake witnessed small businesses trying to get a lot done with little budget and resources; he spoke endlessly to busy business owners desperately trying to prioritise their time and work on the stuff that really mattered. They needed an extra pair of hands to jump on tasks like design work, business development, data admin, and social media content. Paperound makes it as easy as possible for a student and a business to work together on a project, whether that’s an hour or a few days.
For students, kickstarting a career is difficult when entry-level jobs are becoming more competitive and there are fewer opportunities to build experience. For small businesses, there are 100s of tasks on their to-do list, but limited budgets mean they can’t commit to a full-time hire. Paperound brings these needs together to help students get real work experience while helping small businesses and start-ups get more work done, at the time they need it most.
Since launching, Paperound has created a community of 45+ taskers from 20 different universities and launched local marketplaces connecting the next generation of start-ups with talent networks in Leeds and Bristol, in partnership with the local authorities.
Daumantas Dvilinskas – TransferGo
Daumantas Dvilinskas founded his company, TransferGo, after graduating from the University of Lancaster. He designed his business with the aim of making his customers lives easier. TransferGo enables it’s customers to make fast, low-cost money transfers safely and securely.
The company was founded in 2012 when the founders were just starting an import and export business abroad and experiencing problems with transferring money internationally. They found that the transfers were often slow and incurred big fees with zero customer service available. The founders decided that they wanted to create a unique business model which offered superior customer service, and they created TransferGo.
The founders spent six months trying to obtain regulatory licensing and an additional four months trying to convince banks to work with them on their project. After they were told their own bank was going to shut down their project, they needed to demonstrate that TransferGo was having a meaningful impact on our customers’ lives and improve the way money was handled. They eventually managed to find a bank that would work with them, and are now working to ensure their business makes a tangible difference. They aim to make transferring money as easy as sending a text message.
TransferGo now works with over 30 banks worldwide, and were nominated for Fastest Rising Start-up at TechCrunch Europa Awards 2018 alongside being named one of the 5 hottest scale-ups in the UK by TNW. They are currently planning to expand even further and offer international transfers between new countries.
Robert Turp
Robert Turp graduated from Lancaster with a degree in Geography in 2011. He has since helped develop and launch a new employee fitness app, focusing on at-home movement routines to encourage healthy habits and physical exercise for organisations adapting to remote working.
He claims that studying geography at Lancaster sparked a deep interest in international travel. Learning about different cultures and global challenges was something he always enjoyed about the course. Shortly after graduation, he was extremely fortunate to do some travelling and he ended up getting offered a job in Fiji, which involved working directly alongside the Ministry of Health to provide unique projects in the South Pacific. His degree definitely helped in terms of preparing him for the type of work involved. It was during this time he really fell in love with community health management (which was closely linked to my original dissertation back at Lancaster.)
Sports coaching and exercise were an integral part to the projects, helping improve both the physical and mental health of local communities. Making fitness fun and engaging was a top priority. Fitness challenges became an effective way to get participants excited and passionate about physical exercise.
When the pandemic hit, he was back in the UK and he thought he could combine his background in creating these exercise challenges with his existing job of running a tech agency to create an app that offered virtual fitness challenges – and subsequently fitness drum was born.
As they were developing the platform, they noticed it was the average office worker, who was trying to adjust to working from home, that was struggling to get enough movement and exercise in during the day. With the gyms closed and the daily commute gone, he was one of those office workers that all of sudden noticed that he was barely moving during the day.
Combining virtual fitness challenges, daily habit checklists and 5-minute daily movement routines (along with in-app coaching), the app was designed to create healthy habits and make keeping fit in uncertain times that little bit easier. It’s exciting to see users from so many countries now log in and follow along to new challenges each month.
A lot of the skills he learned at Lancaster, such as statistical modelling and data analysis, really set the foundation for developing virtual exercise programmes. The overall aim is to go full circle and eventually release a free platform that rural communities around the world can use, providing structured physical exercise programmes and coaching for anyone.
If there is someone you would like to add to the list, please email us directly.
