Keeping Up With Edventures - January 2025

Photo by Katarzyna Pe on Unsplash

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Dear Edventures community,

The start of 2025 has been a good one for us. After two months of searching, we’re thrilled to have found our fourth and final team member. We’ve also made significant platform improvements in preparation for our first pilot project in the Philippines, with everything in place for a successful launch.

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

• Welcoming our new AI Engineer, Bhagya, who brings great qualifications and strong alignment with our mission.

• Pilot project preparations with JAPI are complete, and users will start onboarding at the beginning of February.

• The infrastructural changes this month have been INSANE, both for our backend (including database and user flow changes) and for Anna, our conversational AI.

• We’re presenting our business case in the International Economic Olympiad (IEO) WinterChallenge business competition, where around 2k students will participate over the first two weeks of February.

January: Final Touches Before Take-Off

📣 Team News

After reviewing 288 applications over the course of two months, and interviewing 12 interesting candidates, we’re thrilled to welcome Bhagya to the Edventures team as our latest AI Engineer!

Born and raised in Sri Lanka, Bhagya earned her BSc in Software Engineering from the Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology before heading to the UK where she graduated with an MSc in Advanced Software Engineering from the University of Westminster. Beyond her impressive academic achievements, she has built a remarkable career at the intersection of AI, machine learning, and DevOps. As a Founding Engineer at Proqio, she led their AI development, and she has extensive experience driving large-scale cloud solutions and leading teams at DigitalOcean, Codegen, and Pearson. In her spare time, Bhagya created ImageLab, an open-source, machine-learning-powered image labelling tool now used by Life Sciences companies to analyse medical imagery. With her technical expertise and deep personal alignment with our mission, Bhagya is the perfect addition to our team as we work to empower the next generation of entrepreneurs.

“Growing up in Sri Lanka, I witnessed firsthand how a lack of resources and support can prevent talented engineers and entrepreneurs from reaching their full potential. This challenge has always resonated with me deeply and is one of the main reasons I could identify with the mission of Edventures. It’s become my passion to break down these barriers, which is why I’ve dedicated time to mentoring and training young engineers, offering them free guidance to gain valuable industry experience. I’m incredibly excited to join Edventures, as this opportunity allows me to tackle meaningful challenges aligning with my passion and help build a platform that offers crucial support and coaching for young entrepreneurs—especially those in underserved communities like my own.”

Baghya joins us from Proqio, where she was a Founding AI Engineer, leading the development of their Generative AI systems. She played a key role in building AI-powered tools and systems that enabled structural and civil engineers to analyse real-time data from IoT sensors, pinpoint vulnerabilities, and make faster, more informed decisions. As a founding team member, Bhagya gained valuable entrepreneurial experience building and launching complex AI-driven products with limited resources. This hands-on entrepreneurial experience has given her deep insight into the challenges of building and growing a tech venture, making her a great addition to our core team, and brings unique, first-hand understanding and empathy to build solutions that can meet the needs of the entrepreneurs we support at Edventures. She understands first-hand the challenges of building something from scratch—making her uniquely positioned to enhance Anna, our AI-powered entrepreneurship mentor, with even more personalised and insightful guidance.

At Edventures, Bhagya will lead the development of our AI-powered systems while also enhancing our application’s infrastructure and security. Her expertise in large language models (LLMs), system security, and AI infrastructure will be instrumental in refining Anna, our AI-powered entrepreneurship mentor—making it even more personalised, insightful, and effective.

⚙️ Product Evolvement

Our pilot with JA Philippines (JAPI) began its preparatory phase in mid January, as requested by JAPI since the school year in the Philippines start in January. While we’ve been working hard on improvements throughout the month, we needed an extra week to fully complete the necessary fixes. Alongside this, minor delays on the schools’ side have led us to push the start of the pilot from end of January to early February, ensuring that we initiate and carry out the pilot properly.

Throughout the month, we’ve been pushing to finalise fixes and tweaks ahead of the launch, and one thing that has surprised me is the amount of outdated, dysfunctional legacy code we’ve gradually discovered in the codebase. We’ve weeded some of it out, or commented it out to prevent it from affecting the app, while at the same time we’ve made significant improvements to both the database structure and the AI infrastructure. As an example, we now have a first version of a multi-agentic AI system that will essentially increase the performance and accuracy of Anna as users interact with our AI.

It was already decided within the team that as soon as we have the Alpha version of our platform, the “MVP”, ready for the pilot, we’ll do no more work on it in terms of adding new features or doing structural changes. Instead, our focus will shift to maintaining the Alpha as our live product, while beginning work on the Beta version. We’ll start with a clean slate for the Beta, informed by the lessons learned from the Alpha, feedback from the pilot(s), and our collective experience and knowledge, as well as focus on implementing more best practices.

For example, Aadarsh, who has become deeply familiar with the codebase, is full of ideas for improvements and ways to “get things right from the start.” Cheryl is also eager to lead a complete redesign for the Beta. Having spent January as a fantastic coding copilot to Aadarsh, she quickly learned Flutter and is now writing functional and efficient code. In parallel to her work on the Beta, Cheryl will also be enhancing our branding to create a more coherent look and feel for the Edventures experience—both in the app and across the brand. Lastly, Bhagya’s experience working with DevOps, for example at DigitalOcean, will be massively valuable when designing the infrastructure and security of the app.

As for me, with our Alpha now more “market-ready,” I’ll be ramping up efforts to secure additional pilots and customers. This will involve following up on connections I made last year, some of which have been very promising discussions.

We’ll start ideating and planning for the Beta in early February, and I’ll be sure to keep you updated as we go along.

🗞️ Edventures in the Media

While I can’t really call it a media appearance, we were approached in mid January to provide the business case in an international business competition by the International Economic Olympiad (IEO) WinterChallenge, hosted between 1-15 February. We’re, of course, very excited to see the outcome of this competition, which will see participation from around 2,000 students worldwide. The objective for them is to develop solutions and strategies to help Edventures reach potential users and customers in markets with low purchasing power. We believe this is a fantastic opportunity to gain insights from creative and engaged young people, our actual primary end-users, on how we can expand the reach of our platform.

💰 Funding Opportunities

No new updates to share on this topic.

What’s in the Pipeline for Next Month?

• By the next edition of Keeping Up With Edventures, you’ll read about our initial insights from the pilot, as we, by then, will have onboarded some 150 users to use our platform alongside their JA entrepreneurship programme in the Philippines.

• We expect to hear from two of our pending applications for Eureka Innowwide and Social Tides.

• The publication of the GEM Global Report 2024/25, featuring an article about Edventures.

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 thank you for your continued support, and we look forward to sharing more updates with you next month!

Stay foolish, stay ambitious!

Alexander and the Edventures team