May 2025 - Bonding With the Team and Exploring Pilots in India

Photo by Alexander Zahari

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Dear Edventures community,

May was a busy month—traveling around India, meeting the team in person for the first time since we started working together, and getting real feedback on the platform. There were some bumps (hello, stomach bug) and disappointments (hello, funding rejections), but also solid conversations and progress on pilot talks and product features.

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

• Finally met the team in person, for the first time, in India and Sri Lanka

• Traveled extensively in India, connecting with education leaders, incubators, entrepreneurs, and students to explore pilot programmes and deepen market understanding

• We rolled out document uploads with automatic Business Model Canvas generation, a built-in business glossary, improved email automation, invite codes upon sign up, and polished PDF exports.

• Added new features for entrepreneurs and coaches: action point tracking and better project visibility for mentors in multi-user settings.

• Actively progressing pilot talks in Haryana, Karnataka, and Mumbai with different partners, to test the platform in different environments.

• Funding didn’t go as hoped—rejections from CIF, PLAI, and several VCs—but got into OVHcloud’s startup programme, aligning with our infrastructure migration and enabling cost savings.

• Although disappointed, we’re not discouraged and the focus remains on securing paid pilots, validating the product, and prepare for an investment later this year.

📣 Team News

May was a milestone for us—we finally got to meet in person for the first time. Not all in the same place, but still a win. I caught up with Aadarsh in Lucknow, India, and later with Bhagya in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

In our previous newsletter I mentioned the start of the trip, having gone to Malta then Istanbul. I left Istanbul on 30 April, and I was supposed to head straight to Delhi, but missed my connecting flight in Almaty, Kazakhstan—so I got an unexpected bonus day to explore a new city. Not ideal travel-wise, but not complaining either as I’ve been curious to visit Central Asia for quite some time. I landed in Delhi a day later than planned.

In Delhi, I caught up with Seema (VP at the Directorate of Education in the Delhi state government), Shiv (a fellow entrepreneur building a ghee business), and Aditi (President of JA Alumni India). We had great conversations about entrepreneurship education both locally and nationally, and I depended my understanding of the Indian educational system. Shiv and I discussed the circumstances budding entrepreneurs face in the state of Haryana, and potential avenues for pilots in the state. Aditi and I met up again after having met first time at the global JA Alumni conference last year in Porto, and we discussed different ways to engage the alumni community using our platform.

It was also nice to finally see a few of the sights I missed on my last visit, like Humayun’s Tomb, Safdarjung’s Tomb, Lodhi Garden and the Lotus Temple. I’ve always been drawn to architecture and photography, and these places really delivered on both fronts. Delhi can easily feel chaotic and hectic at times, but these sites provided pockets of peace and calm.

Next up was Bangalore, the city where I spent most of my time during my last trip to India a few years ago, so it felt like returning to familiar ground. There I met with Amey, who oversees incubation efforts at NASSCOM, an Indian non-governmental trade association and advocacy group that primarily serves the Indian technology industry, and works closely with the Government of Karnataka’s Ministry of IT to support startup ecosystems in the state. We had a great chat about the current state of incubation and entrepreneurship support in Karnataka, which gave me a clearer picture of how and where our platform could fit into the landscape.

While in Bangalore, I also took a day trip out to nearby Tumkur to meet Puneeth, the programme manager at Siddaganga Technology Incubator. I also got to visit the Siddaganga Institute of Technology, where I briefly spoke to about 100 first-year MBA students on short-term trends in entrepreneurship and why the world needs more founders stepping up to solve meaningful problems. After the talk, Puneeth gave me a quick tour of the nearby Sree Siddaganga Math—a 15th-century ashram that provides free education and housing to over 10,000 underprivileged children. We wrapped up the day at the incubator to learn more about the incubator’s ongoing work and explore how our platform could complement their existing programmes and add value for the entrepreneurs they support.

Photos by Alexander Zahari

After Bangalore, I headed to Mumbai to reconnect with Dr. Aparna and her entrepreneurship students at NMIMS Navi Mumbai, where they run the STEM E-Cell. It was a great visit—Aparna and I discussed our prototype and the potential for running a pilot together. We also explored different strategies for expanding our presence in India and talked through what our first few moves should be.

That conversation gave me more clarity, and confidence, that we’re on the right track by focusing on mid-tier institutions (B2B2C). These organisations are often hungrier to stand out and are actively looking for ways to boost the value they offer their students. It’s a sweet spot where ambition meets affordability, and it aligns well with the way we’re building out our platform for entrepreneurship coaching and learning.

Beyond my sit-down with Dr. Aparna, I also got to spend time with the E-Cell students, led by co-presidents Yash Pandev and Yash Patil. Their team had prepped a podcast session, and honestly, it was a blast. We had a wide-ranging conversation covering everything from entrepreneurship in Sweden vs. India, to advice for first-time founders, and some of the hard-earned lessons from my own journey. Great energy and great conversations!

From Mumbai I made my way to Lucknow to spend a full day with Aadarsh, our lead engineer. No laptops, no whiteboards—just a proper hangout in his hometown, which was long overdue since he joined Edventures in October last year.

Then it was back to Bangalore for what was supposed to be a short stopover before heading to Sri Lanka. However, a stomach bug had other plans, and a few days turned into a full week in Bangalore, with half of that time spent recovering. Not ideal, but you should always listen to your body.

Before the stomach bug, I had the chance to meet Abhimanyu, an entrepreneur and venture builder. We had a great conversation, and he connected me with an organisation called 18startup, that we are currently in talks with to launch a pilot with in June.

Once I’d recovered, I made my way to Sri Lanka—partly to celebrate my birthday, and partly to meet up with Bhagya, our AI and Backend Engineer. We spent an evening together in Colombo, joined by her husband. As we all happen to be F1 fans we watched the Spanish Grand Prix together over dinner. A really chill evening with good people, and a perfect way to wrap up the last leg of the trip.

My travels rolled into June, but I’ll share the rest of that story for next month’s update. As I’m writing this on the 12th of June, I’m back in Sweden—refocused, and fully heads-down again.

Photos by Alexander Zahari

⚙️ Product and Business Evolution

We’ve been shipping steadily on the product side this past month, with updates that make the platform more useful, more intuitive, and better suited for real-world use—especially by first-time entrepreneurs and the organisations supporting them.

We’ve introduced document uploads, where founders can upload a pitch deck, business plan, or project outline and have Anna generate a Business Model Canvas based on it. This speeds things up massively for early-stage users, both in terms of onboarding to our platform but also in terms of structuring their thinking from scratch, letting them get a visualised plan based on what they already have.

Another addition is the new Business Dictionary—a simple in-app glossary that explains key entrepreneurship terms directly in the conversations you have with Anna. This helps level the playing field, especially for users who are either new to the space or not operating in their native language.

We made some backend improvements too, especially around how invite codes work. Super admins now have more control over who joins and how, which makes the platform easier to manage at scale—something that matters as we bring in organisational partners.

Under the hood, we’ve also tightened up all our email automation flows: smoother signup verification, better password reset handling, reminders for inactive accounts, welcome emails that don’t get buried, and automated cleanup of old, unused accounts. It’s the kind of invisible stuff that just makes the whole system feel more polished and reliable.

Another fix that people will appreciate—our BMC PDF downloads now actually look good. They were buggy and broken before, and we’ve cleaned up the styling so that users can download and share something that looks professional and complete.

Entrepreneurs can now mark their Action Points as completed, which might sound small, but it’s a big win for clarity and accountability. It helps both the entrepreneur and their coach keep track of what’s been done and where to focus next, turning fuzzy to-do lists into a clearer roadmap.

On the coaching side, we’ve added the ability for mentors to see exactly which entrepreneurs are linked to which business projects. This gives better visibility and makes it easier to work with teams in academic settings or incubators where multiple users may be collaborating on the same business project.

On the business development side, we’ve started exploring pilot programmes in Haryana, with the help of Shiv, through his network of government-funded self-help groups and academic institutions and incubators in the region. We’re also continuing pilot conversations with Amey and Puneeth in Karnataka, and with Dr Aparna and her team at NMIMS in Mumbai, while also continuing conversations with a handful of other organisations outside of India.

Each of these partnerships represents a different kind of learning environment, and together they’re helping us test how well the platform adapts across contexts—from grassroots community programmes to established university ecosystems.

Photos by Alexander Zahari

💰 Funding Opportunities

Wrapping up May, I’ve got to be honest—it wasn’t the month of wins we were hoping for on the funding front. Unfortunately, we didn’t make it through to either CIF or PLAI Accelerator. And in classic fashion, the rejection came with the all-too-familiar: “Due to the high volume of applications, we’re unable to provide personalised feedback.” Always a bit of a letdown, especially when we know the work we’ve put in and how well these programmes would’ve fit our current development.

That said, we might be disappointed but we’re far from discouraged. Progress doesn’t always come in the form you expect. We were accepted into the startup programme with OVHcloud, and we’ve already started migrating our Alpha infrastructure from DigitalOcean. It’s a good move—not just because of the cost reduction, but also because it gives us a solid learning runway as we prep the Beta architecture. Getting this hands-on experience now will pay dividends later when we’re scaling the platform more seriously.

On the investor side, we heard back from a few names I connected with during the Malta trip—LookAI, Soulmate Ventures, and No Cap VC (which brands itself as the world’s first AI VC). We also heard from Morgan Stanley’s Inclusive and Sustainable Ventures Lab. None moved forward with us this time around. Disappointing? Sure. But again, part of the process.

The silver lining is that the support from OVHcloud allows us to lower our burn, freeing us up to be more aggressive through June and July in demoing the Alpha, but also as we build the Beta. We’ve made meaningful improvements over the past couple of months, and now it’s time to get those in front of the right people.

Our north star remains unchanged: secure pilots, validate our approach, and keep building with purpose, so that we can secure paying clients and an investment later this year.

What’s in the Pipeline for Next Month?

• Begin search for a new AI Engineer as we transition Bhagya to an advisory role

• Potentially finalise and sign our new Product Designer to accelerate our Beta development

• Submitted applications to Startup Sauna, Tetuan Valley, Startup Spain, Seedcamp London, TechAngels, and You Is Now Accelerator

• Introduce RAG, allowing organisations to add their unique data to our AI

• Complete the move of the Alpha from DigitalOcean to OVHcloud

• Meetings scheduled with 15+ potential pilot clients, and our aim is to secure 2-3 paid pilot projects in June

• Travels continue to Dubai and Budapest, before heading back to Stockholm and Sweden

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