Inside the mind of a student founder

Top 10% of Y Combinator applicants globally, out of over 20,000 startups. Wolfson Entrepreneurship Competition 2026 finalists. Development grants from Google and ElevenLabs. All of it traces back to one night at Kingston University. It finally happened through the Nest.

The Nest is Kingston University’s founder development community, supporting promising student and graduate entrepreneurs as they develop their ideas and build early-stage ventures. Members gain access to workspace, mentoring, peer support, and opportunities to strengthen the skills, confidence, and networks needed to grow their businesses.

How I came up with my winning idea

The idea did not arrive in a single moment. My co-founder Apan Trikha and I originally built Scientia, a teach-to-learn platform. After speaking to customers and investors, including Europe's largest edtech VC, we kept hearing the same thing: people want to learn in the flow of work, not separately from it. We then realised the same technology could serve physical trades, a vertical almost entirely ignored by the tech industry. That became Coffee AI, an AI-powered platform that captures expert knowledge from experienced professionals and delivers it to less experienced technicians in real time. Apan brings a Cambridge MPhil and experience at Amazon. I spent years building production AI systems across European markets. But it was Kingston that gave us the launchpad.

My journey to Coffee AI

I first entered through Bright Ideas, and that is where I discovered The Nest. I applied not for the money, but because I wanted to connect with people who were motivated, like me, to create something from nothing. Those three earlier rejections were never wasted. Each one came with conversations that worked like sandpaper, polishing how I pitched, how I thought about customers, and how I connected research in human-computer interaction to a real product.

When they announced we had won, I was ecstatic. The other finalists were amazing, and some already had paying customers. We had none. We won because the judges saw us as the most likely startup to scale, a pure AI SaaS (software as a service) business built on technology that could grow.

What surprised me most was what happened after. One of the judges - Malcolm Paul, went out of his way to support me long after the competition ended. Two talented individuals, Mahan and Benedikt, reached out and offered to join as interns. One night opened doors I didn’t know existed.

We invested the £10,000 into cloud infrastructure, AI compute, and tools to run real experiments with users. Every pound went into the product.

What I learnt by becoming a student founder

Looking back, I wish I had known this: be extremely obsessed with your customers. Young founders have one advantage, naivety. Twenty years of experience teaches you what is "supposed" to work. Naivety brings experimentation, and that is where true growth is born. Sometimes not knowing the rules lets you see what everyone else misses.

Small teams with clear ownership move the quickest. Two people with a clear problem and a timeline will out-ship ten people in stakeholder meetings. Speed comes from decisions, not consensus.

My advice to any student on this journey: talk, build, sell – to your customers. Kingston gave me the arena to start. The rest was up to us.