April 2025 - New Places, New Features, and New Lessons

Photo by Alexander Zahari

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Dear Edventures community,

April has been a month of purposeful travel, product refinement, and continued exploration of funding and collaboration opportunities. As we press forward with our development, we continue implementing feedback from conversations we’ve had in March and April with potential partners.

If you’re just getting to know us, here’s a recap

Whether it’s your first or hundredth newsletter, I’m so happy you’re reading this newsletter and that you want to follow us on our journey towards becoming the global leader in entrepreneurship support, democratising entrepreneurship education and learning for all. You’re receiving this newsletter because we’ve been in touch for the past weeks, months or maybe years, and because your interest, skills, experience and/or professional focus aligns with our mission and values.

For those who are new subscribers, or to give you a quick recap, Edventures is an edtech and future-of-work startup based out of Sweden but with a fully remote and international team, spanning across three continents. Our mission is to develop a cutting-edge conversational AI that provides personalised coaching and learning experiences tailored to each entrepreneur’s specific business idea, needs, and challenges. Our platform also supports entrepreneurship organisations, coaches, and educators who play pivotal roles in supporting aspiring entrepreneurs.

Read on to discover this month’s latest updates and milestones. If you’re in a rush, below are the highlights you need to know about from last month.

TL;DR

• Attended the EU-Startups Summit this year again, second year runningMet with several potential pilot partners as well as investors during the Summit, which will be followed up on in May

• The trip to Malta kicked off a few weeks of travelling on my end, with the purpose of meeting my team members, Aadarsh and Bhagya, as well as old and new connections. Starting in Malta, then continuing to Istanbul and later India.

• Improved product onboarding and user verification

• Continued interviews for our next Product Designer

• Started planning for cloud infrastructure migration to EU-based provider

• Applications went out to:

  • Civics Innovation Fund together with a project partner in Hungary to get funding for a small pilot for 12 months, as well as to
  • Onstage (prev. Focal)
  • A16Z speedrun
  • No Cap, accordignly the world’s first AI investor

📣 Team News

The process to find our next Product Designer is still very much in motion as we continuously review new applications and schedule interviews with candidate we find interesting and a potential great fit.

Right after Easter I travelled to Malta to attend the EU-Startups Summit. It was great reconnecting with a friend I made during last year’s summit, who also hosted me while I was there. During this year’s summit, I met with some potential investors, both early-stage VCs as well as angels, among them Look AI Ventures, Soulmates Ventures, ULTRA.VC, and Prospera Ventures. I also met representatives from organisations where our platform could potentially be implemented. These follow-ups are already in progress.

From Malta, I travelled to Istanbul for a short visit before continuing on to India. The purpose of this trip is to finally meet up with my team members Aadarsh, based in India, and Bhagya, based in Sri Lanka. Along with this I’m also meeting up with old and new friends and connections.

My flight from Istanbul was delayed, causing me to miss my connection in Almaty, Kazakhstan. This gave me the chance to explore a new city I’ve never been to before, in a region I’ve been wanting to visit for a long time. And after this one-day stop, I definitely want to explore more of Central Asia. The airline rebooked me for the flight to Delhi the following day and I arrived in India on the 2nd of May, 24h later than initially planned.

⚙️ Product Evolution

We’ve made improvements to the UI, especially making the UI more intuitive and guiding. For example, we’ve made it more visual what sections of the BMC is left to fill out, and easier to fill them out manually (or by our AI). We also made improvements for setting up a business project, which is core to getting started using our platform and to get valuable coaching from our AI.

Previously, onboarding relied heavily on Anna, our conversational AI. While powerful if done thoroughly, this created friction for some users and limited the ease of the onboarding. We’ve now introduced simplified onboarding flows to reduce confusion and drop-off.

We’ve made it easier to connect to an organisation by adding an organisation-specific invite code, which your organisation will provide to you. This makes it easier for users to connect to the right organisation without having to do all selections themselves.

If you want your own invite code, reach out to me by reaching out here on Linkedin or on other socials.

We’ve also added an email verification step to the onboarding. Once a new user creates their profile, a verification email will be sent out prompting them to verify their account within 24h of creating the account. We added this verification to reduce the number of ghost accounts and improve the quality of our user data.

One feature we had planned to implement, but haven’t been able to yet, is the document uploads feature, which we started looking into in March. The feature will offer entrepreneurs a simple and smooth way to upload a document and generate their Business Model Canvas in a few seconds. This will further simplify and speed up the onboarding to our platform, as well as make it easier for user to share information about their business project with us so that our AI can derive more insights and provide better coaching. This feature will instead be released in May, along with other updates.

💰 Funding Opportunities

April wasn’t the easiest month when it came to funding outcomes. Unfortunately, we weren’t selected for the next stages with Onstage, A16Z Speedrun, Eksim Ventures, Norrsken Accelerator, or the Echoing Green Fellowship. A small silver lining was receiving feedback on our Echoing Green application, helping us better understand their decision and how we can strengthen future submissions.

We’re still awaiting decisions from PLAI Accelerator and Turkish Airlines via the Eureka Network Investment Programme, both which we’ll hear from in May. While the latter may seem like a far-fetched route, they’re currently piloting startup content (video pitches) in their in-flight entertainment, and we see real potential in offering travellers access to our platform as a unique and engaging learning experience.

👀 What’s in the Pipeline for Next Month?

• South Asia travel continues – stops include Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai, Lucknow, and Sri Lanka

• Document upload feature for entrepreneurs (and maybe also coaches)

• Improving prompt engineering, agent workflows and handoffs

• Automating some repetitive and maintenance-related tasks via backend agents

• Dividing the backend and AI code into separate codebases for improved scalability and maintainability

• Comparing EU-based cloud providers as we prepare to migrate from DigitalOcean, as the move will help us reduce costs and better comply with GDPR

Get the latest updates about our progress straight to your inbox by making sure you sign up for our newsletter, and be among the first to test our prototype by joining our Earlybird Community!

On that note, I want to wrap this month’s newsletter by thanking you for your continued support, and I look forward to sharing more updates with you next mont

Stay foolish, stay ambitious!

Alexander and the Edventures team