London-based Huzzle has raised £1.43M in Pre-Seed funding for careers-focused social networking.
Ingmar Klein was at university in Switzerland when he began to envision a solution for his peers, who were attempting to balance studying with part time jobs and running societies. Student societies aren’t just a surefire way to forge identities, friendships and an unhealthy attachment to threadbare merchandise; increasingly, they’re a key conduit of work experience that propels members on to prestigious graduate jobs.
Societies run on volunteers who juggle a bundle of incompatible systems. They stretch across Whatsapp for comms, Facebook for events, Google Forms to solicit feedback, Instagram for promotion and email for outreach. Ideas can’t get off the ground, events go unattended and committees burn out. The labour of building communities around Venture Capital, Neuroscience, Foreign Affairs gets distilled into unverifiable lines on a CV.
To solve this, Klein and co-founder Parham Rakshanfar built Huzzle, a social hub to connect communities of young professionals with each other and with employers. In his words? “Like LinkedIn, but less cringe.”
You log into Huzzle as either an individual, society or employer. Committees can use the platform to organise and promote events, connect with others and reach out to companies for sponsorship, speaking events or showcases. It has onboarded 600 societies so far, testament to candidates and recruiters' mutual urge to ditch the exhaustive application funnel for a more sustained, authentic relationship.
The site integrates a ChatGPT API that tailors students’ applications to specific jobs. “Most applications never get read.” Klein says. “You have to game the system. We’re trying to get you into that upper quartile where someone reads the application.” He moved to London to launch the company there due to the pivotal role of societies within its university ecosystem: the UK hosts 10,000 of them, and many institutions have paid sabbatical officers who manage them.
Klein isn’t the first founder to convert his dissatisfaction with online spaces into motivation to rewire them; Alejandra de Brunner’s The Ethos Network, an app where young people connect and mobilise over shared social causes, has raised $1.9M so far. Investors often run from the suggestion of a social media investment due to the moderation challenges that scaling presents, the ironclad market share of social giants and unclear paths to profitability, but increasing disillusionment with social media among young people offers an opportunity to disrupt.
The round was led by 10X Founders alongside several angel investors including Verena Pausder, Chairwoman of the German Startup Association, Leon Szeli, the Founder of Presize and Alexander Mrozek, a former Global Product Lead at Google.
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