Company: Umii
Age: 25
Website: https://umii.app/
Business: Umii is a well-being app that helps to tackle student loneliness and isolation, users build a profile, verify against their university and from there are able to build meaningful friendships.
About Georgia and Umii
In 2020, Georgia took over Umii as Director, Umii is a university-based networking app that helps students experiencing isolation and loneliness to connect with others and form friendships based on shared interests.
It was whilst studying for her undergraduate degree in Human Geography and Sociology that Georgia experienced the loneliness and isolation that came from not clicking with her flatmates. She found the distance between her accommodation and the main campus also added to this sense of loneliness and she wanted to find more people she could connect with. Though Georgia admitted she was close to dropping out of university, she persevered and when the original founder of the Umii app resigned she was offered the opportunity to become a shareholder and Director. Georgia empathises with the emotional struggles students may face when joining university.
Umii was created to help students in similar positions to Georgia. The platform allows students to choose their university, select societies and interests and build their unique profile. This app helps to provide a safe digital space allowing students to organically connect without the in-person social pressures that can make these interactions hard. As it is built off of shared interests there is a greater basis for meaningful friendships to be developed with the added aim of wanting to reduce the number of university dropouts.
Umii has partnered with a range of different universities that have all noted the positive impact of the app. One university has seen almost 1,400 users in the first 4 months whilst a survey that was conducted found that 52% of respondents found that Umii made them feel less lonely. Over 12,500 individual connections have been made through the app and it has also been in talks with US universities with hopes to take the app to Australia too.
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