Morning Innovators ⚡ In less than 5 minutes, we’ll cover…

🥳 The best funding opportunities, events and jobs in the Start-Up world this week
📰 This week’s biggest news stories in the Start-Up world
🔎 How this Start-Up is rebuilding how Gen Z find careers
👠 How to use pop culture to make your product go viral
📈 An AI tool that allows you to have a full-time marketer, without the salary.

✨ Last week’s most clicked link, was this link taking you through to apply for the Baltic Ventures accelerator, with successful applicants getting up to £100k in funding.

Happy hustling,

Rich

🎤 Opportunities + Events

 🇪🇺 Araya Sie Fund has just announced its first close of £7.5m, backing female Founders with £300k cheques across pre-seed and seed stage in healthcare, climate, fintech and deeptech/AI covering UK and Europe - contact the team here!

🎤 FundMyPitch have announced their UK wide pitch competition with a £50k investment on the line - apply here!

⭐️ A* Capital have just raised a $450m fund to invest at the Seed stage. They’re sector generalists that write big cheques - connect with the team here!

We now have a community of thousands of Start-Ups and Founders, here are the hottest Start-Up job opportunities from the Innovators Uncensored community on our very own Start-Ups Job Board!

💼 Start-Up Jobs

🧑‍💻 Mid-Senior Product Enigeers, Cleo AI
🧑‍🎨 Senior Product Designer, Lottie
🐕 Full Stack Software Engineer, Waggel

🗣 Eleven Labs hit with fresh lawsuit over use of voices. Sifted

💰 Andruil raises $5bn, doubles valuation to $61bn. TechCrunch

🏦 FinTech startup Parker files for bankruptcy. TechCrunch
 
💊 Isomorphic Labs raises £1.6bn to scale AI drug design engine. UKTN

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This week’s campaign isn’t an official one, but it’s absolutely genius. Everyone has been talking about the new ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ film, but Adam Probert has come up with an elite marketing campaign for Strava in relation to the release of the film.

Most people who use Strava will post about their run after they’ve completed it. So, Adam suggests that Strava set their runners a challenge. Give them a predetermined route in the shape of a high heel, get them to complete the route and share it on their stories. If they complete the route, they get a free coffee at participating cafes.

This is a genius way to use current pop culture trends to show off your product.

How can you use pop culture to promote your own product?

Each week we highlight our favourite tools - either something we’ve been using in our businesses, or tools that our Start-Up community have recommended.

Blaze 2.0 is the marketing solution for people who don't have time to do marketing. It learns your business, your audience, and your voice - then creates and manages your entire content strategy, automatically. Like having a full-time marketer on your team without the salary.

🚀 urfuture: Rebuilding How Gen Z Discover Careers

While much of the recruitment industry still relies on CVs, job boards, and outdated hiring processes, urfuture is building something entirely different. Founded by Thomas, urfuture is a social-first careers platform and behavioural matching engine designed specifically for Gen Z. Instead of asking young people to search for jobs based purely on titles or keywords, the platform helps them discover opportunities based on who they are, their behaviours, motivations, and strengths.

For employers, urfuture offers a smarter way to attract and assess entry-level talent, helping companies move beyond traditional CV screening to find more diverse, better-matched candidates. With over 150 million social views and partnerships with major UK employers, urfuture has quickly become one of the fastest-growing Gen Z careers brands in the country.

Building the Team: From Solo Founder to Mission-Aligned Co-Founders

Thomas initially started the business on his own, but over time realised that building a company of this scale required people who shared both the mission and the responsibility.

His first Co-Founder, Jayel Williams, joined as urfuture’s founding employee and played a critical role in building the operational foundations of the business. Later, Holly Hobbs, already a well-known careers creator through her own business Apprentivia, joined the founding team after the two connected through the early careers ecosystem.

The biggest lesson for Thomas was clear: while you can start alone, scaling a meaningful business requires people around you who deeply believe in the mission and bring strengths that complement your own.

Landing the First Customers: Relationships and an Unexpected TikTok Explosion

urfuture’s earliest customers came through Thomas’s existing network. Having previously worked in the apprenticeship and early careers sector, he already had credibility and strong relationships, which helped open the first commercial doors.

But the biggest breakthrough came from an unexpected place: TikTok.

By creating careers-focused content designed specifically for Gen Z, urfuture generated over 100 million views in its first 12 months. That audience growth didn’t just build awareness with young people, it attracted employers directly. Some of the company’s earliest major customers reached out via TikTok DMs after seeing the traction and recognising the potential of social-first recruitment.

It was a pivotal moment that proved what Thomas had suspected: recruitment could become a discovery experience, not just an application process.

Scaling Beyond Early Success: Turning Social Proof into Commercial Growth

Once urfuture had initial traction, the team built a more structured sales engine around it. They expanded into a multi-touch go-to-market strategy, combining outbound business development, email outreach, LinkedIn engagement, partnerships, and inbound leads generated through social media.

The real catalyst for scaling, however, was outcomes.

As urfuture began delivering measurable improvements in candidate quality, engagement, and diversity for major employers, they built strong case studies and social proof. Sales conversations became easier because they were no longer selling just a vision, they were demonstrating clear results.

Lessons Learned: Focus, Patience, and Choosing the Right Build Partners

One of Thomas’s biggest early mistakes was product development.

As a non-technical Founder, he initially partnered with the wrong development agency - something he estimates set the business back six to eight months. It was an expensive reminder that for non-technical Founders, choosing the right technical partners can make or break early momentum.

The second lesson was around patience.

In the early days, Thomas often expected progress to happen faster. Like many Founders, he chased short-term wins instead of trusting the long-term process. Over time, he learned that startup growth often feels invisible, until suddenly it compounds.

Funding the Business: Building Investor Belief

urfuture initially bootstrapped its behavioural science research before raising a pre-seed SEIS round to begin building the product.

Since then, the company has completed additional top-up rounds and expanded its angel investor network, raising approximately £2.3 million to date.

Thomas found that fundraising at the earliest stage is as much about the Founder as it is about the product. Investors know the idea will evolve, they want confidence that the person leading it can evolve with it. Building credibility, communicating a compelling vision, and demonstrating resilience became just as important as the platform itself.

The Biggest Challenge: Disrupting a Traditional Industry

One of urfuture’s hardest challenges has been changing behaviour in an industry that has remained largely unchanged for decades.

Even when employers acknowledge that traditional recruitment systems are broken, changing internal processes can feel risky. urfuture has had to balance genuine innovation with practical adoption - building something disruptive, while still fitting into the workflows employers already understand.

That balance between disruption and familiarity has been one of the most difficult parts of scaling.

Biggest Lessons: Focus on the Workflow, Build Defensibility

Looking back, Thomas says one of the biggest mistakes was trying to do too much too early.

Like many startups, urfuture experienced feature creep, expanding beyond a clear product identity before pulling back and refocusing. If he were starting again, he’d focus on owning one critical workflow and becoming exceptional at that before expanding.

His second major lesson is about data.

In an AI-driven future, Thomas believes the next generation of successful SaaS businesses won’t simply be interfaces layered on top of large language models, they’ll be built on proprietary datasets that can’t easily be replicated.

For urfuture, that moat is behavioural data, matching science, and the deep trust they’ve built with Gen Z audiences.

As hiring evolves, urfuture isn’t just building another recruitment platform, it’s helping redefine how an entire generation discovers opportunity.

Next week I’ll be highlighting another awesome Start-Up, as well as sharing all the usuals including funding opportunities, Start-Up news, plus plenty of awesome tips, tricks and tools.

P.S. Connect with me on LinkedIn…