What on earth are you telling me, Félix?
That you’re going to bet your money on 3 young people under 25 who have only just finished university?
Yes, indeed. Who says there aren’t brilliant, successful projects and companies that were born at a university? And it doesn’t have to be Stanford or Harvard: it can be the UPM in Madrid, the Complutense, Comillas, Carlos III, the UCJC, the UAB or Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.
Spanish universities caught the entrepreneurial bug from other universities a long time ago, and they have people and departments supporting entrepreneurship – and if not, it’s the students or alumni themselves who launch initiatives and programmes to promote entrepreneurship and the creation of startups at their universities.
Some alumni have even set up investment clubs, as at IE, IESE, ESADE, the UFV…
So where did Unigow come from?
Well, a good friend, serial entrepreneur and investor, Sascha Badelt, who joined SEK Lab as a mentor a few years ago, told me about them.
Sascha has a very good eye for talent because every year he organises, for EO Madrid, the university entrepreneurs’ competition GSEA (Global Student Entrepreneur Award), which is held all over the world.
In 2020 he organised his GSEA at the UCJC’s premises and told me… “Félix, you have to meet three 19-year-old lads who are launching a startup in the education sector; I’m sure they’d be a good fit for SEK Lab”.
But they didn’t apply, because they were at a very early stage – though they did the following year.
The three musketeers, Alejandro Cañada, Ale Sanchez and Louan Rousseau, are the founders of UNIGOW, a platform that connects secondary school and sixth-form students with 2nd, 3rd or 4th-year students from different universities, to give them better guidance on what they’re thinking of studying.
That was Unigow’s value proposition, what they call peer to peer, or collaboration between equals. Alejandro Cañada learnt the hard way what it’s like not to choose the right degree first time round, losing a year as well as the financial cost. And thousands of students go through this every year for lack of good guidance beforehand.
Well, I loved the idea, but even more I loved how clear the three of them were about it, and how much they were achieving with very little money – pure bootstrapping, as they say.
The Unigow team started to get moving, going to events, pitching and getting quite a lot of media coverage. Blimey, they even appeared in EMPRENDEDORES magazine.
Once again Sascha told them: “guys, you have to apply to SEK Lab, the accelerator Félix leads, so you can keep growing”. And what happened? They walked in, winning over the tough jury that each year selects the 12 best innovative education startups for our acceleration programme.
And they kept on conquering… If there’s one great thing about SEK Lab, it’s its top-notch mentors, and more than 5 of them said they wanted to mentor Unigow. With those reinforcements, Unigow kept validating and improving its product and its market fit, and they also hired several of my students from the Entrepreneurship degree at the UCJC.
From the start I nicknamed them my “winning horse”, and I wasn’t wrong. They triumphed during the 6 months of SEK Lab and afterwards. They were finalists at the GESAwards, which I organise every year, and went to the final in London, plus other awards they picked up along the way.
But they’re such stars that they’ve managed to get through their respective degrees, work like Trojans on their startup 12 or more hours a day, play sport, and go out and have fun like other young people their age.
But what matters to an investor is seeing results, and that’s what they showed their mentors, so we all decided to invest in a “non-public” round. We’ve had that privilege: getting in at an attractive valuation, and we know they’ll make the most of our money.
I came in in January 2024, and since then, every month without fail (unlike other startups I’ve invested in), they tell us about all the milestones they’ve reached, the customers they’ve signed, new partners… and that’s a real pleasure.
I recommend you follow them, because they never stop evolving, and now they also help students find their best first job, and universities and companies get the best leads and candidates.
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