Designs by Edventures
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Dear Edventures community,
March has been one of those months where a lot happens quietly — no dramatic pivots or big announcements, but a steady accumulation of meaningful progress that, taken together, made March a productive month. We shipped a brand-new website, refined the platform, pushed forward on partnerships, and had some candid conversations in the fundraising space that are worth sharing openly (more on that as you read on). Transparency matters to us, and it’s very much part of what this newsletter is for.
As always, thank you for being here. Whether you’ve been following Edventures for years or just found your way to this newsletter recently — welcome, and read on.
If you’re just getting to know us, here’s a recap
Whether it’s your first or hundredth newsletter, I’m so glad you’re here and that you want to follow us on this journey. We’re working towards becoming the global leader in entrepreneurship support — democratising entrepreneurship education and coaching for first-time founders everywhere. You’re receiving this because we’ve crossed paths at some point, and because your interests, skills, or professional focus resonates with what we’re building.
For those who are new, here’s the quick version: Edventures is an edtech and future-of-work startup, headquartered in Sweden but operating with a fully remote and international team spanning three continents. Our mission is to build a cutting-edge conversational AI that delivers personalised coaching and learning tailored to each founder’s specific idea, context, and challenges. Beyond individual founders, our platform also supports the entrepreneurship organisations, coaches, and educators who are on the front lines of helping aspiring entrepreneurs succeed.
Read on for this month’s updates and milestones. If you’re short on time, the highlights below will catch you up.
TL;DR
- Launched a new website (and help centre and blog) — all scoring 99–100/100 on page performance
- Improved the platform with bug fixes, UI refinements, and a new onboarding tutorial for new users
- LLM development is progressing as repeated testing and benchmarking is helping us narrow down our baseline open-source model
- Two new partnership agreements nearing the finish line, with ~5 more in active discussions; focus is on activating signed partnerships and getting more users onto the platform
- Applied to MSISVL and Alaian’s AI agents open call, expecting responses in April
- Eureka Innowwide feedback received: scored 74/100, sadly not enough to secure funding but received strong qualitative feedback
- Confusion around an acceptance from Decelera Ventures “decelerator programme”, and the conversation that followed about AI defensibility we think reflects a wider concern worth expounding on
💜 Team News
No big changes to report this month. Honestly, that’s a good thing. The team is focused, heads-down, and moving steadily on our priorities.
⚙️ Product Evolution
The biggest news this month is that we launched a new website, and it’s more than just a facelift. Along with the new site, we’ve launched a brand new help centre which is a dedicated space where users can find step-by-step guides, FAQs, and answers to common questions on their own, along with a redesigned blog where we share lessons, updates, and food-for-thought articles for first-time founders. We’ve also launched weekly product classes I host every Wednesday at 2pm CET, free for anyone to join, ask questions, and get tips on how to get the most out of the platform. Together, these updates all serve the same intention — to make sure founders can onboard, get to know Anna our AI coach, and start getting real value from the platform quickly and on their own terms.
The latter two are hitting page performance scores of 99 or 100 out of 100 for both mobile and desktop. The nerd in me loves this, and if you’re curious to see for yourself, here are the results for our blog on mobile and on desktop, and here’s the help centre on mobile and on desktop. We’ve consistently scored high before as well, and when you care about the founder experience from the very first click, performance matters. We’re still tidying up a few minor bugs and overflowing elements, but the site is live, it’s fast, and it’s ready. Check it out here!
On the platform side, we’ve been doing the unglamorous but essential work of iterating. We’ve squashed bugs, tidied up UI elements, and generally made the experience feel more polished. We also made a meaningful upgrade to our referral programme, reworking the backend so that organisations can now create unique links and run multiple distinct promotions simultaneously, something that wasn’t possible before. This opens up more flexibility for our partners, who can now, for example, reward competition winners, hackathon participants, and other groups with differentiated offers, all from a single account.
As part of our focus on activation, we’ve added a new onboarding tutorial, basically a showcase feature that walks first-time users through the platform during their initial logins. We’ve also been filling in empty states and adding brief, clarifying descriptions throughout the onboarding sequence, all with the goal of helping new users find their footing quickly and confidently.
Lastly, behind the scenes the work on our own LLM continues. We’ve been running repeated rounds of testing and benchmarking, which is helping us narrow down which open-source models to use as the baseline for the entrepreneurship-specific LLM we’re building. This is painstaking work, but it’s the foundation everything else will rest on, so it’s worth the effort.
🌍 Community
In addition to the five MOUs we’ve already signed, two more partnership agreements are now in the final stages of the pipeline, with approximately five others in active discussions.
But signing partnerships is only half the story. The real challenge and focus for us now is activation. In practice, this means working with our partners to onboard their communities, whether that’s cohorts of student entrepreneurs, competition participants, or incubators and startup programmes. The goal is simple: get real founders, at the early, messy stages, in front of the platform, and learn from their experience to make meaningful improvements.
We’ve been focused on getting the platform into the hands of more users through the partners we’ve already signed, so that we can understand what’s working, what isn’t, and where we need to improve. It’s an iterative process, March has been the start of that cycle, and it will continue in the months ahead as we listen, adapt, and improve.
If you’re part of an organisation that works with aspiring founders and you’re curious about partnering with us, I’d love to hear from you.
💰 Funding Opportunities
We threw our hat into several rings this month, and received word on some previous applications.
We submitted applications to the Morgan Stanley Inclusive and Sustainable Ventures Lab (MSISVL, for short) and to an open call for AI agents from Alaian, an innovation hub created by a coalition of telcos across Europe, Africa, and Latin America. We should hear back from them in April, if we proceed.
We heard back from Eureka Innowwide, a European Union-backed programme that funds international feasibility projects for innovative SMEs. We submitted this application in Oct/Nov last year, and our application proposed a market validation project to localise and validate our AI coaching platform for first-time founders in India with one of our partners there. We scored 74 out of 100, clearing all required thresholds, but not high enough to secure funding.
What I really appreciate with Eureka Innowwide is that regardless if you get funded or not, they always give you feedback on your submission, which as a founder, is immensely valuable. This time, what I found interesting and why I wanted to share this with you, wasn’t the score but what the feedback actually said. Three independent evaluators recognised the core of what we’re building as both credible and genuinely relevant. Our approach (providing continuous, personalised AI-guided coaching to underserved first-time founders) was singled out as a real differentiator in a space dominated by selective incubators and generic AI tools. They viewed our team’s capabilities, our existing local partnerships in India, and the strategic logic of focusing on India as a validation market before scaling globally all favourably.
The honest summary from the evaluators was this: the score reflects good performance across all criteria, but was dampened by the need to better evidence what we already believe to be true. That framing really resonated with me. It’s exactly where we are right now, and also why our focus is to generate real-world evidence through structured pilots with our partners: user outcome data, validated conversion metrics, and concrete performance benchmarks gathered on the ground.
A few weeks ago, we received an email from Decelera, a “decelerator” programme I’ve been keeping an eye on before, telling us we got selected to proceed in their selection process. We all got excited, but only briefly, as it became clear that the acceptance had been an error on their end, using an AI (ironically) to make the first filtration. We understood and took it on the chin. As a founder, I’m always looking to get some feedback, so I asked what their reasoning behind this retreat was based on. What I received back was two reasons: one, we weren’t the right geographical fit as Decelera is rooted in the Mediterranean and focused on southern European startups. No big deal, I get that. Second, and this is where it gets interesting, was around product defensibility — essentially, how do you protect an AI-based platform in a market that’s evolving this rapidly?
And this question I believe isn’t unique to Decelera as many stakeholders, not only investors, ask AI startups this all the time. We think the question itself reflects a broader hesitation living in the back of many investors’ minds when they look at AI-first startups right now.
So I wanted to take the opportunity to share our view on this concern in the open, rather than quietly move past it. We have a clear perspective on this question, and it shapes every decision we make about how we’re building. It’s core to the roadmap we’re following. Expounding on this would take up too much space in this newsletter, and I feel I’ve already made this month’s newsletter longer than usual, which is why I wrote a dedicated blog post on this topic. Would love to know your thoughts on this.
👀 What’s in the Pipeline for Next Month?
- Keep improving the platform by listening to and acting on user feedback. We’re genuinely grateful to everyone who takes the time to share their thoughts, and we want more of it. If you haven’t tried the platform yet, sign up here and tell us what you think.
- Double down on activation by working hand in hand with our signed partners to expand platform reach, gather structured feedback, and turn our pilots into meaningful proof.
- Bring the final-stage MOUs over the line and welcome new partners into the community.
Get the latest updates about our progress straight to your inbox by signing up for our newsletter, join our Earlybird Community to connect with other first-time founders, and be among the first to test our live MVP!
On that note, I want to thank you for your continued support, and I look forward to sharing more updates with you next month.
Stay foolish, stay ambitious.
Alexander and the Edventures team