2026 has seen the world face a series of terrifying events, and news seems to be a continuous stream of disheartening information. It is an absolute pleasure to be bringing to your inboxes, therefore, a newsletter focused on the wonderful, the inspiring and the hopeful ☀️.

Each month, eureqa! will highlight the work of student entrepreneurial and artistic ventures, from universities across London as well as Oxford and Cambridge with the intention of celebrating innovation and inviting collaboration. 

For our first edition, we have chosen the theme of April Fools (no joke), highlighting the exceeding of expectations, the fooling of competitors around you with innovation and the growth of spring time. 🍋 Sour surprises and sweet success; This month's students have shown how they have viewed issues from unique angles, how mistakes can be transformed into strengthening ideas and have really demonstrated the best of young entrepreneurial potential.

Looking for your next business collaboration? Curious about what your peers are up to? Just want a monthly injection of positivity in your inbox?

👉Subscribe to eureqa! and celebrate alongside us!

— Lauren Manby (Editor in Chief)

📍University College London (UCL)

Sometimes things happen differently. Differently from what we imagined the year, the month, or even the week before. And sometimes, in those moments, we grow far beyond what we thought we were capable of.

At echo!, we connect founders and brands with (micro-)influencers to enable authentic collaborations, without requiring large marketing budgets. At its core, echo! exists to solve what I came to see as one of the biggest constraints for early-stage startups: distribution.

But that realisation didn’t come all at once.

I’m Leo, an undergraduate student at UCL, and a year ago my world looked completely different. Before moving to London, my main focus was music 🎸. I founded, played guitar in, and managed a band for three years in my hometown. What I valued most wasn’t just the music; it was being part of a team of highly skilled individuals, each with their own craft, all working towards something bigger. There was something powerful about being the underdog, driven by creativity, ambition, and shared belief.

When I joined UCL’s Entrepreneurs Society, I realised how much of that same energy existed in startups and I was immediately drawn in.

Over the following months, I started building. My initial idea was a language-learning tool for advanced speakers, based on a problem I had experienced myself. As a non-technical founder, I had never written a line of code, and starting felt uncomfortable and strange. Still, through BSA (UCL’s startup incubator), I leaned into it, learning by doing, building quickly, and figuring things out along the way.

Then, over time, a different insight emerged.

As more founders around me began launching their MVPs, a common challenge became impossible to ignore: building isn't the bottleneck anymore, distribution is. Getting those first users, that initial traction, proved far harder than expected. Many tried to solve this by becoming content creators themselves, spending hours scripting, filming, and editing, often at the expense of improving their core product .

That shift in perspective changed everything. Then came a week that, in hindsight, redefined the entire journey 🧭.

After validating the idea informally, I made a decision that felt slightly absurd at the time: I paused my original project and gave myself one week to build something new. That week became echo! Days and nights blurred into one: designing the platform, refining the user experience, connecting the backend, and turning an idea into something real.

To many, it probably looked like an (April) Fool’s moment. “Weren’t you building something else?” they asked. But echo! was what founders, including myself, needed most.

What makes echo! different is its focus on accessibility and authenticity. Instead of requiring large budgets or forcing founders to become marketers, we enable direct collaboration with micro-creators that have engaged niche audiences and can genuinely amplify early-stage ideas.

Looking back, none of it unfolded the way I expected. It wasn’t linear or planned. It was unexpected, slightly chaotic, but necessary. And maybe that’s the point.

Sometimes exceeding expectations isn’t about perfectly executing the original plan. Sometimes it’s about recognising when to change it entirely and building something better because of it. The best decisions I've made rarely felt like decisions at all; they felt like inevitabilities I'd been building towards without knowing it.

— Leonard Ulrich

📍London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)

At the start, we had a pretty bad idea.

We wanted to build a “Tinder for flatmates”. You swipe, you match, you find someone to live with. It sounded fun. We thought it made sense. But when we spoke to students, we realised something. Finding flatmates is not the problem. Finding a flat is the REAL problem in London. That’s when it clicked. So we stopped everything and changed direction.

We’re Nathaniel and Romain (UCL & LSE). We built Flatly after going through flat hunting ourselves. Honestly, it was just long and painful. You have to check loads of websites, and half the time you keep seeing the same places or things that don’t really make sense. It takes hours, and you still feel lost.

So we built Flatly. Flatly is a free weekly newsletter. Every week, we check 15+ rental websites in London. We filter everything and keep only the best student flats. We also share sublets and flats you don’t usually see, like off-market ones.

What makes it different is simple. We remove options.

There’s already way too much to look through. You can spend hours scrolling and not get anywhere. We just send a short list that’s actually worth checking. 

At Flatly, we started by solving the wrong problem. We fooled ourselves at the start. But by listening and changing direction, we ended up building something much more useful. The biggest thing we learned is this; Your first idea is often wrong. You have to listen, adapt, and try again.

— Nathaniel Benhamou & Romain Sekri

📍Imperial College London (ICL)

During the devastating earthquake that hit Turkey and Syria in 2023, over 60,000 people tragically lost their lives. Thousands sustained injuries requiring long-term rehabilitation. Propose was born from this context of disaster response, but it addresses a broader, global gap that persists even in advanced healthcare systems such as the UK.

Driven by firsthand exposure to these challenges, Iris, the founder of Propose, brought together a high-skilled team from Imperial College London to rethink how physiotherapy is delivered and experienced. In the UK alone, around 70% of patients do not complete their prescribed exercises, largely because they are unsupervised, repetitive, and difficult to sustain over time.

Propose is a digital AI movement platform designed to address these barriers through a structured approach. First, it creates a digital skeleton to track movements and assess form in real time. Second, it incorporates gamification features, such as daily streaks and interactive elements, to maintain user engagement. Finally, it enables physiotherapists to monitor progress remotely and adjust exercises when necessary, creating a continuous feedback loop between patient and clinician.

We are launching the product in early April to be used at the TCS London Marathon. Over 1.13 million people applied for the 2026 marathon ballot, highlighting the scale and demand within the running community. This provides a high-intent user base for Propose’s pilot. The expectation is to convert engaged runners into retained users and direct a portion into partner clinics through injury prevention and recovery pathways, using the marathon as both a distribution channel and a validation point ahead of the pre-seed round in May.

— Paapa Baffoe, Iris Yalcin, Noman Bobar, Lavinia Carolis

📍King’s College London (KCL)

I’m Cai, founder of the podcast Cai’s Circle, where I speak to influential and inspiring individuals “in my circle”. I’ll be revealing the secrets of politicians, billionaires, and various experts at the tops of their fields for my ambitious audience to learn from.

Unlike other podcasts, I engage in activities with my guests. So far, I’ve tasered an engineer with a taser that he’s built himself, and given my phone to the leading woman on LinkedIn so that she can write me a post and make me viral (it worked). Our very first episode launches this Wednesday the 25th of March on YouTube and Spotify (I recommend YouTube because my Canary Wharf studio is very cool). This episode stars a prestigious Goldman Sachs investment banker, known for having a sixth sense when it comes to spotting opportunity.

If you want to discover the secrets of my inner circle, check out my Instagram, TikTok or LinkedIn @Caifinch, where all links will be available.

— Cai Finch

📍University College London (UCL)

Dear eureqa! readers,

I’m Charlotte Sell-Mendoza, a 22-year-old singer-songwriter from Brighton. Shifting between singer-songwriter, folk, and jazz influences, I tell stories of love, heartbreak, and the confusing emotional turmoil that is being in your early twenties. Alone in my tiny, mouldy, overpriced room, sat on a bed with my guitar and a notebook, these stories are ‘mine’, but when given a stage, a microphone, and an audience, perhaps they could be yours too?

Writing and performing original music requires vulnerability, and though it may seem silly, the first hurdle is simply opening a notebook and putting a pen to page. Simply daring to try and not allowing your creativity to be stifled by irrational self-judgment. Ironically, as soon as I began writing, I found myself thinking: why hadn’t I done this before? After a few months, I suddenly felt a strong urge to be heard by other living beings, not just the dying plants drooping in my room and decided to try singing at open mics. A nervous 18-year-old living alone for the first time abroad, performing at open mics was a very daunting experience. I would avoid eye contact and apologise a million times; though this is partly due to being British, nothing I can do about it sorry...“Fool them! If you don’t point out your mistakes, no one will know!”: This is a sentence I must’ve heard a million times. And I have to agree... but only 75% of the time.

Flashback to 14th May 2025. I spontaneously chose to visit a famous spoken word and storytelling night in Amsterdam called Mezrab. Seeing a guitar on my back, the host welcomed me with open arms and asked me if I wanted to play a few of my originals throughout the show. The room wasn’t massive, but filled to the brim, bustling with approximately a hundred people, none of whom I knew. It was terrifyingly exciting, or excitingly terrifying, but when would a moment like this pop up again? So, I went for it, and it was going marvelously, until... I forgot my lyrics. Everything went pitch black inside my head. My immediate reaction was total panic, but strangely something shifted in the air, and I began to speak to the audience. I said what was on my mind (aka, tumbleweed), looked at their faces and saw that they were right there with me. We all had a laugh as my brain descended into total jelly and, what had been so mortifying two seconds before, suddenly seemed to transform into a stand-up comedy interlude. No need to fool anyone, all that was needed was authenticity. 

Mistakes aren’t a bad thing, whether you’re an artist, an entrepreneur or a friend, they show that we’re human. And funnily enough someone actually sent me a DM the next day asking if it had all been a part of my ‘act’. That night was a turning point in the way I see the relationship between the audience and the artist and continues to shape how I perform my music today. I write and perform to bring people together; offering a part of myself out to the world in the hope that others might want to do the same.

I’m absolutely delighted to be featured on this first exciting edition of eureqa! Thank you so much for reading!

If you are interested in my music, I have two upcoming dates in London on the 7th and 15th April! Check out my Instagram for tickets and videos of my music! @csellmendoza

— Charlotte Sell-Mendoza

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