Neuture.ai, a newly founded start-up with a big ambition: to democratise access to university study. “We define ourselves as a social impact fintech,” co-founder and CEO Andrea Pinto tells Startupbusiness, “because we do have a business model that makes us actively sustainable, but the aim of the project is to make it possible for everyone to have access to university studies in ways that make it possible not only to support expenses but also to create job opportunities.
The start-up has created a platform that enables students who enrol to access information on public scholarships that are already available and to count on potential sponsorships from companies that have an interest and desire to support specific students in their studies. “It is important to emphasise that scholarships and sponsorships are two very different instruments, in the first case we have grants, donations, that are given under conditions that impose very limited constraints, while in the case of sponsorships a real contract is signed between the student and the sponsoring company that stipulates certain constraints that are respected by both parties in order to guarantee its validity.
The founders of Neuture.ai, who, in addition to Pinto, are Saverio Mazza and Vincenzo Marcianò, have calculated that the average annual cost for a university student in Italy is 10,400 euros, which includes fees, accommodation, books, transport and various expenses, and there are approximately 340,000 students living below the economic threshold which enables them to attend university, which means that, according to these figures, the financial support needed to enable everyone to study should total around EUR 3.5 billion per year, and currently public scholarships in total provide around EUR 1 billion. It is therefore necessary to find new resources and the idea of Neuture.ai goes precisely in this direction.
“If we consider,” the CEO continues, “that overall Italian companies with more than 250 employees turnover €1.5 trillion, it is clear that allocating the necessary endowment to help students would amount to little more than 1% of these turnovers, what we do is make the process very simple and straightforward, for both students and companies, solving all the problems related to identifying the most suitable students for the company’s needs, solve all the problems related to the modalities and the management of payments of these sponsorships, and this is where we understand why we are in fact a fintech, give companies that want to engage in this for both talent acquisition and brand awareness reasons the opportunity to access our student community and manage all the steps in a simple and increasingly autonomous way. We retain a 10% commission on each transaction’.
The start-up has only been formally established for a few weeks, but its platform already has around 700 scholarship announcements available and has an enrolment rate of around 10 students per day, with a total of over 300 enrolled to date. It has already received interest from numerous companies from various fields and sectors who are interested in contributing in the form of sponsorships.
To date, the start-up has been self-financed, but the CEO anticipates that they are working on opening a pre-seed financing round worth around 300,000 euros, at least 50,000 of which are already pre-committed: “Our desire is to grow rapidly both in numbers, in the development of the platform, which is destined to become increasingly automated in order to allow students and companies to find each other and proceed with the activation of sponsorships, and in geographic growth, because our ambition is to provide a service with a European scope. (pictured are two of the co-founders).
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