University of Birmingham – Successful Alumni who Founded Startups

If there is someone you would like to add to the list, please email us directly. Please see our shortlist below!

 

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Kat Searson – Tula

 

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Kat Searson founded health and wellbeing company Tula after graduating from the University of Birmingham. Her team is currently consisting of practitioners and experts who are passionate about their profession and are considered to be leaders within their fields.

The team boasts a variety of psychotherapists, artists, financial experts and yoga teachers, movement specialists and nutritional therapists who are offering holistic support. This support is available in all areas that can affect wellbeing.

Kat has previously worked as a yoga teacher, coach and consultant for companies such as Red Bull. She created Tula with the aim of helping customers to increase their self awareness which should then enable them to work better. The expertise from all of the team at Tula considers how performance both in and out of work can be affected by the interconnection between physical, mental and emotional health.

Tula has specific foals designed for individuals, businesses and both as a collective. They want individuals to be “happier, healthier, feel more supported, informed, and inspired to take control to feel and function well”, businesses to “have expert led support, with a happier, healthier workforce, retained top talent, increased productivity and more profit” and for the collective to be “recognised for their unique skills, able to make more of an impact, learn, grow and be supported by the community they are on a shared mission with”.

 

Simon Rabin – Chip

 

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Simon Rabin is the founder and CEO of Chip. Chip is a digital savings account bringing the best interest rates, making investing easy and automatically building savings. The former Immanuel College and Birmingham University student worked previously for SMS startups before setting up Chip in 2017.

With Chip, the startup raised the largest equity crowdfund on Crowdcube in October totalling £11.5 million, raising £1 million in under 10 minutes. Chip is now the second biggest investor community in the UK FinTech scene and perfect for schnorrahs!

Chip is aiming to make saving effortless, easy and fun, and their goal is to build the best savings app in the world, which they are currently in the process of doing. To date, Chip has automatically saved more than £600 million for over 450,000 savers already.

This has been done through the use of AI, Open Banking and a disruptive approach to traditional banking. Chip makes it easy to open a market leading savings account in a couple of taps, as well as deposit, track and withdraw your money. The team are constantly on a mission to negotiate the best rates for their customers.

This was a service that used to only be available to the super-rich, but Chip have worked to collate savers’ money, so we can negotiate with banks like customers are millionaires. Chip is being built by a fast-growing team of designers, developers, customer service professionals, marketers, banking experts, and entrepreneurs, with the support of more than 11,000 investors and a huge community of Chip savers.

 

Daniel Lipinski – Outfund

 

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Daniel Lipinski is the founder and CEO of Outfund. Outfund is a business helping individuals to gain up to £2m in funding a month. The process is designed to be hassle free, enabling people to retain their equity. The former Immanuel College and Birmingham University student is not new to entrepreneurship. The former Groupon employee is also responsible for the set up of a logistics platform called ParcelBright. This has since been sold to Veeqo.

Through his efforts trying to secure both investment and loans, Daniel discovered many pain points for entrepreneurs. This led him to want to create his own business, and Outfund was born. Since it’s creation, Outfund had quickly become the largest eCommerce investor in the UK. Outfund announced a fund raise of £37 million in December last year with the help of Fuel Ventures, TMT Investment and Force Over Mass.

 

If there is someone you would like to add to the list, please email us directly.

 

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Tash Grossman – Slip

 

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Tash Grossman is the CEO and founder of Slip, an app allowing customers to get digital receipts via QR code scanning. She has been a finalist in Verizon’s Young Entrepreneur Competition, graduated the founder Institute programme and most recently, voted Retail Week’s Startup of The Year for Data & Insight and runner-up to the full competition.

In January 2020; the soon-to-be entrepreneur was stood in a 45-minute queue at Zara waiting to return a pair of trousers. The buckle had broken, and Tash was wanting to exchange them for a new pair, but had lost her receipt. After queuing (impatiently), she was told, ‘no receipt, no exchange’ and felt unbelievably frustrated. It wasn’t that the trousers were bank breaking, but it was the lack of a digital alternative that irritated her more.

Knowing she wasn’t alone in finding e-receipts a substandard alternative, Tash spent time researching and discovered she was in good company. E-receipts have significantly low adoption rates, mainly caused by the process-heavy checkout experience.

Realising there was a gap for a digital solution that meets the needs of Retailers and their shoppers, Slip began to evolve – a retailer agnostic app, that allows customers to receive digital receipts, simply through scanning a QR code. No more emails, no more paper.

It has sustainability at its core, driven by eliminating harmful non-recyclable receipts. Customers can view and manage their omnichannel spending and receive exclusive discounts offers and personalised content based on what they buy. For Retailers, it provides powerful data and insights around consumer trends at product level. In an age where omnichannel shopping is increasingly popular, retailers need first-party data to understand customers’ buying habits.

Fast forward almost two years and Tash has quit Management Consulting to solve this problem for customers like herself. The past 18-months of development have been a roller-coaster with late nights and early starts, but each day has been an exponential learning journey.

This motivated entrepreneur has had the opportunity to meet hundreds of new people across the tech, start-up and retail landscape, all who have added value to the business, exploring concepts she had never discovered and opening doors assumed firmly closed.

 

Annaliza Sturge – Streethunt Games

 

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London couple Tony and Annaliza launched a new outdoor adventure game last summer which has been proving popular for date nights, team socials and getting together with friends. The game is outdoors and there’s no contact with anyone outside of your team.

StreetHunt Games provides engaging outdoor, self-guided mysteries set around captivating locations in London – think grown-up scavenger hunt meets escape room, played outside across London. All you need is a phone and a sense of adventure!

Colombia’s Finest introduces you to Jim Robusta and his coffee company – Jim’s colleagues have shady pasts and Jim has asked you to sniff out evidence of a crime amongst the caffeine.

The activity costs £15pp and takes around two hours with individual team sizes of two to five (larger groups form multiple teams). Players self-navigate to offbeat locations, solving location specific cryptic clues, immersing them into their own murder mystery investigation.

Annaliza Sturge, StreetHunt Games’ co-founder, said ‘We’re always looking for new immersive events across the city and at the start of 2020 my husband Tony took the plunge to write his own game and roped in his brother to turn it into an interactive web-based experience.

‘My background is in accountancy and following redundancy, I decided to pursue my dream of running my own business. It’s been a huge change for me personally moving from a well-paid corporate role to setting something up from scratch in a completely new industry. I’ve loved the challenge and being recognised in two national small business campaigns whilst receiving amazing feedback on the game has made all my hard work worthwhile.

‘We’ve gone from strength to strength since launching in July 2021 and hosting corporate events from September. This year we’re planning to expand into other UK cities, launch our second London game and we’re running singles and student events alongside our corporate offering.’

 

James Grant – MyTutor

 

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James Grant is the Co-Founder & Managing Director, B2B for MyTutor. MyTutor is the UK’s most trusted tutoring platform and the largest provider of in-school tuition in last year’s Government-backed National Tuition Programme. MyTutor recently secured a £15 million Series B Follow On investment led by SEEK Investments.

James founded TutorTap, the contemporary of MyTutor, in 2013 after graduating from a BA in Philosophy at University of Birmingham.

MyTutor’s mission is to provide life changing tuition for all, regardless of background, and is unique in its offering by supporting both disadvantaged students through its schools programme and private tuition partnering directly with parents. With their base of 20,000 tutors they’ve supported over 1,000 Secondary Schools, hundreds of thousands of parents, and delivered over 2 million lessons.

MyTutor is unique in that all its tutors are carefully vetted subject experts from the UK’s top universities. Being close in age to their students, the tutors not only provide academic support, but also build confidence and provide mentorship too.

 

If there is someone you would like to add to the list, please email us directly.

 

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