16 April 2025 •

Keeping Up With Edventures

March 2025 - Building With Purpose and Increased Focus

march25.jpg

Photo by Sergey Shmidt on Unsplash

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Dear Edventures community,

March was a month of steady progress, reflection, and important groundwork at Edventures. While we faced some temporary dips in team capacity, we used the time to analyse and act on user feedback, and fine-tune our roadmap. As always, we’re building with purpose—and momentum is picking up again.

This update is shorter than usual, yet sweet, so happy reading!

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

  • Cheryl’s contract expired and wrapped up her time with us; the search for a new Product Designer is well underway with over 200 applications received.

  • Development slowed slightly due to team capacity, but momentum continued.

  • The pilot with JA Philippines concluded, as planned, in March, and we’re now in talks to potentially extend with a smaller focus group

  • Feedback from the pilot, and other users in parallel, highlighted important updates needed to our platform, among them UI/UX clarity issues as well as a more flexible way to interact with your business project.

  • The Business Model Canvas tool was enhanced based on pilot feedback—users can now manually create, edit, and delete each segment as they like.

  • Document uploads is underway, enabling our AI to use uploaded documents for personalised support—launch planned for April, and the second step is to introduce RAG in May.

  • We’re developing a more detailed product roadmap for 2025, and hashing out our broader 2026–2027 milestones and timeline.

  • Mixpanel was re-integrated to improve user behaviour analytics, essential for product decisions.

  • Accepted into Mixpanel’s Startup Programme.

  • We’re in the selection process for the PLAI Accelerator 2025 cohort (7-8 startups, 6 month-long programme) and applied to multiple other opportunities:

📣 Team News

March brought some changes within the team. Cheryl completed her time with us, as her contract expired, and transitioned into a full-time role at a hospitality management scale-up based in New York. Although her stint with us was brief, her contributions were impactful—she redesigned and implemented the UI across both coach and entrepreneur interfaces, and also played a role in mapping out the future design flows for our Beta version. We’re grateful for her work and wish her all the best in this new chapter..

As Cheryl’s seat opened up, we started the search for our next Product Designer. Since mid-March, we’ve received over 200 applications—an encouraging sign of the interest in what we’re building—with around 20 candidates, so far, progressing to interviews or design sessions. We’re still taking applications while also being at the tail end of the process with two candidates who have progressed farthest.

Internally, our capacity during the month was slightly reduced. Aadarsh was engaged with back-to-back mid-term exams for a full week, and Bhagya experienced some medical issues that required time away and healing. These factors collectively slowed our pace but didn’t stop our momentum.

⚙️ Product Evolution

Product progress continued steadily through March, even if we shipped fewer new features than usual. We updated our Mixpanel integration on the frontend which wasn’t just a technical update, but an important step to improve how we track and understand user behaviour across the platform. With our redesigned UI and new user journeys, the old integration from last year was outdated and didn’t track the interactions properly. From here on, we now have accurate analytics, essential to identify drop-offs, uncover pain points, and inform better product decisions for the Beta.

Our pilot with JA Philippines officially concluded in March and on schedule, as their wider programme wrapped up at the end of the month. Following the conclusion of this pilot, we’re in discussions to potentially extend the pilot with a smaller focus group through to August, when their programme begins again. This would allow us to continue testing and implement user feedback until August, preparing for a larger pilot once schools are back in session.

One of the most important updates this month was to the Business Model Canvas tool. Answering the feedback from the pilot in the Philippines, we’ve made it possible for users to manually input and edit each segment of the canvas. This change responds directly to user frustration with previous constraints, and creates a more flexible and intuitive experience for entrepreneurs mapping out their ideas. It also makes it easier for new users to onboard, as they directly and manually can set the baseline for their business project, without having to do it all through our conversational AI, Anna.

At the same time, we’ve begun enabling document uploads into the platform, which we’re aiming to release in April. This was also a highly requested feature during the pilot, as well from other organisations we’re in talks with. Once implemented, we’ll be able to make AI-generated Business Model Canvases for entrepreneurs, and simplify the onboarding. The goal is to reduce friction and empower users to bring in their own content in a way that feels seamless and smart, alongside our AI.

A second step to this new feature is to enable Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) from various documents that users upload to our platform, which will enable both entrepreneurs and coaches to upload documents that our AI can draw information from—whether to generate a Business Model Canvas for a business project, access organisation-specific resources through Anna, or surface other relevant content that coaches wish to share with their entrepreneurs.

With March being a slightly quieter month on the development side, we had the opportunity to step back and reflect. In addition to feedback from our pilot, we heard from other users and organisations that parts of the platform still feel unclear or unintuitive. In response to this, we’ve started refining these aspects—through either subtle UX tweaks or the addition of clearer, more guided features and/or a more intuitive UI changes —to make the platform feel more self-explanatory and user-led. We also began to map out a clearer, more detailed product roadmap for 2025, which is being aligned with our broader strategic objectives for 2026 and 2027.

We’re in encouraging talks with several organisations about new pilot partnerships. While many are currently focused on launching new programmes and cohorts - which has naturally shifted timelines into May and June - the interest and engagement has been genuine. Although we’d love to get more pilots started right away, the delay works to our advantage. The feedback we’ve received throughout February and March has been incredibly valuable in highlighting where the Alpha needs to be clearer, more intuitive, and more useful. This extra time gives us the space to act on that feedback properly, continue consolidating the Alpha, and sharpen our focus. With our product roadmap for Q2 (April, May, and June) becoming more clearly defined, the timing aligns well - allowing us to shape a more refined, valuable, and ultimately more lovable platform, ready for the next round of pilot partners.

💰 Funding Opportunities

As I write this in early April, we’re in the selection process to join the PLAI Accelerator in Italy, as we’ve had a first interview a few weeks back, and some follow-up, light due diligence over email. Their application window for the programme doesn’t close until mid May, so we push forward no matter what, and hope to secure this opportunity for us as soon as possible. The opportunity itself, to partner with the largest publisher in Italy (which is behind this accelerator), would add significant value as content partner, which is something that’s part of our content strategy and roadmap that we’re developing.

On other fronts, we were accepted into Mixpanel’s Startup Programme, which will support our user analytics efforts moving forward. We also submitted applications to several notable opportunities, including the Norrsken Accelerator, the Morgan Stanley Inclusive Ventures Lab, and the Lee Kuan Yew Global Business Plan Competition (LKYGBPC).

👀 What’s in the Pipeline for Next Month?

  • Continue development of the 2025 product roadmap

  • Follow-up conversations with three potential partner organisations, with discussions set to continue into April, May, and June

  • Enhancements to the agentic system, increasing both its accuracy and the number of deployed agents

  • Strengthened error handling, role-based access, and sign up flow, including account verification as well as organisation invite codes

  • Implementation and release of the document upload-feature, with a RAG-implementation expected to follow in May

  • Ongoing UI adjustments to enhance a more intuitive, consistent and user-friendly experience

  • Grant application to the Civic Innovations Fund (CIF) for a proposed 12-month pilot in partnership with an entrepreneurship organisation in Hungary

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