Niya - AI Career Pathways for Unconnected Communities

Niya is on a mission to generate economic opportunities for 100 million unconnected people this decade.

Despite 90% of businesses struggling to find skilled talent, there are over 500 million people underutilised in the global labour market. This is because capable but unconnected people don't have fair access to networking, training and job opportunities.

This skills gap is costing G20 countries $11 trillion and it's growing as more people are forced to career transition due to physical displacement and job disruptions from technology. Beyond it's economic implications, this growing skills gap is also perpetuating the cycle of poverty, leaving more people at risk of not accessing quality jobs and a stable source of income.

Niya is closing the skills gap and creating a more inclusive labour market by 'connecting the unconnected'. Using AI technology to empower refugees, migrants and low income communities in their careers, connecting them to the right people, skills and jobs at the right time.

Niya is the first career platform using AI to help unconnected communities with end-to-end career transitions.

Charities and local authorities refer unconnected people to Niya's platform as users. Meanwhile, employers and training providers upload any opportunities they offer to these communities. Then, leveraging OpenAI Niya connects the right users, to the right opportunities at the right time.

To keep this simple, Niya generates bespoke career pathways for every user, signposting them to the right networking, training and jobs. The pathways take someone's past experience, current skills and future aspirations into account, as well as growing labour market demands. This means we can upskill users in alignment with emerging skills gaps, bringing job security and a stable source of income for years to come.

Niya is also using AI to support inclusive job description drafting, to help users create succinct bios, and for PDF resume parsing. Niya's AI even works in reverse, matching employers / training providers to relevant candidates / learners.

Users: Unconnected people who are pursuing careers in tech / data - currently UK centric (but a presence in 50+ countries) with plans to expand geographies and sector over time. Immediate focus on refugees, migrants and individuals from low income backgrounds with scope to expand to support other underrepresented communities. These people are currently underserved by the labour market, struggling to access mentorship, training and job opportunities to develop in their careers. Niya offers them free access to all three.

Charities / local authorities: These organisations directly support refugees, migrants and other unconnected communities. Social mobility is a key target output of their work and Niya's platform enables them to (a) promote their support to more users (b) boost employment among those they already support. Scaling and tracking this impact via Niya's platform enables them to access more funding and reinvest into social impact.

Employers / training providers: These organisations are looking to fill their skills gaps and diversify their teams by hiring / mentoring / training talent from unconnected communities. Niya's platform offers these organisations a scalable and simple way to connect with unconnected talent, all while integrating with their existing HR applicant-tracking-systems.

Every member of Niya’s team has had lived experience of, or proximity to the problem we are setting out to solve. We are deeply committed to the company’s mission and believe our tech solution has the potential to transform 100 million lives.

Holly Simmons - CMO / Head of Growth - Award winning female founder, 6+ years scaling social impact startups, including founding team of YC backed startup, work in multi $bn VC and venture builder at Rocket Internet.

Hugh Chichester - CEO - 10+ years working on refugee and philanthropic causes, led multi-billion dollar digital innovation projects at 3x tier 1 investment banks.

Cameron Brown - CPO / COO - 10+ years working in enterprise HR Tech and overseeing product development in talent sectors. Grew up in Middle East and extensive volunteering with refugee communities.

Tanveer - CTO - Has built and exited 4 x AI enterprise businesses, serves as a tech advisor to high growth B2B ventures and migrated to the UK to work as Head of Innovation for a global digital transformation consultancy. Tanveer migrated to the UK 8+ years ago.

Banu - Head of UX/UI & Community - Launched & scaled tech communities of 10,000+ people in her native Iraq and received personal recognition from Sheryl Sandberg for these efforts. Banu migrated to the UK as a Chevening Scholar 5 years ago.

Niya is proving itself to be a high impact, high revenue business.

We’ve onboarded 4,251 users already with >100 charity / council referral partners. We have >3.5k jobs and >1k free training programmes on the platform, with the likes of IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce and Cisco all sharing their opportunities on Niya's platform.

We've generated >$350,000 in B2B revenue to date and users continue to access the platform / pathway tool free of charge. 

Our team would love nothing more than to participate in this programme.

Having recently received funding, we are well equipped to invest heavily in our product-led growth, accelerating our product development and roadmap.

To accompany this, we would like your support with our GTM strategy, specifically with scaling Niya's partnerships and sales to simultaneously grow user / client volumes. We haven't invested in any marketing channels for acquisition on either side of the marketplace yet, but would love to kick this off with the funding on offer. Your combined monetary / non-monetary support will help us to scale acquisition, working towards product market fit so we can begin to uptick MoM growth and boost Niya's ARR / impact.

Beyond this, we would also like to access mentorship and leadership coaching through the programme. Our culture is incredibly important to us as a team and we want to lay strong foundations now, so that our inclusive culture can be maintained as we begin to scale our operations across borders. 

Any guidance around impact measurement is also welcomed as we build out our social mobility impact framework.

Niya's platform brings all stakeholders in the labour market into one platform, our AI joins the dots. The combination accelerates educational / economic empowerment. 

Existing job boards / AI matching platforms offer visibility and optionality for jobs, but lack the broader networking and training opportunities that unconnected communities really need.

Non-profits offer curated information and 1-1 support to the right communities, but they’re not tech centric, lack scale and fail to offer beneficiaries long-term support / career access.

LinkedIn has size and scale, but it’s unpersonalised and overwhelming for our users, connecting them to people and jobs based on their past, rather than their future. This is why less than 10% of the labour market use it on a monthly basis and why we're already seeing higher engagement on Niya's platform.

Niya offers it’s users an end-to-end career solution, combining the scale/simplicity of tech-centric solutions like LinkedIn, with the curation of a localised community/non-profit.

Rather than letting AI proliferate the skills gap, Niya is leveraging it to accelerate end-to-end career transitions for the world's most unconnected people.

We anchor our impact to the UN SDGs:

SDG4, Quality education: Niya aggregates thousands of free e-learning resources, offering users the soft / hard skills, mentorship and support they deserve.

SDG5, Gender equality & SDG10 Reduced inequalities: Niya’s users are referred by frontline charities and >50% are women. Our tech removes barriers to access, promoting equality in the labour market.

SDG8, Decent work and economic growth: Rather than letting AI proliferate social inequalities, we use AI to close the skills gap, giving historically underutilised people access to fulfilling careers.

SDG17, Partnerships for the goals: Niya partners with 100s of NGOs, employers and training providers. Every stakeholder shares the mission of tackling social mobility and collaborating to level the playing field.

SDG1, No poverty: Niya helps charities to reach those in need, financially empowers low-income people and has plans to support global populations living in poverty.

We want to connect 100million unconnected people to new opportunities this decade.

We are developing a social mobility impact framework where we can determine the impact Niya's platform has had on every user's mobility based on the opportunities they have interacted with and secured on Niya's platform.

These opportunities are all weighted differently in the formula e.g attending a CV workshop or AI event has less impact than completing a certificate in cyber security which has less impact than securing a new job as a data scientist.

We would love your support in developing this framework and setting goals off the back of it.

We use WebFlow for our Landing and Marketing pages. We use a combination of Low Code tools (like Bubble.io) combined with a few orchestration tools to build our App layer - which is hosted on AWS. Our AI models are built on OpenAI, Azure and Google.

All of Niya’s technologies are available free of charge to users and we take care in communicating limitations, ensuring users have a means to search / engage with opportunities via a (non-AI) directory / meilesearch. Given we capture user demographics we acknowledge the (1) opportunities for AI testing on such a diverse population (2) importance of avoiding unfair biases through our technology, carefully monitoring operation after deployment.

4 - Full time (CEO, CMO, COO, CTO)

1 - Full time on maternity leave until Q1 2025 (Product lead)

1 - Part time (Advisor)

1 - Contractor (Account Manager)

3 years 4 months

DE&I is so deeply woven into our culture at Niya. We live by the same guidelines that we insist our B2B clients live by - we adopt inclusive recruitment processes, take the time to educate new joiners, celebrate cultural differences, boost cultural competency and tackle unconscious biases.

For users: An AI-enabled Career Management Platform that enables unconnected people to seamlessly navigate the labour market and find the right personal connections, training courses and jobs at the right time. Users don't pay to access, however long-term we plan to offer a paid B2C solution for premium training courses, where users can either pay / be sponsored by employers to complete select training; Niya then take a cut.

For charities / local authorities: Niya's platform enables these organisations to (1) reach and enrol more beneficiaries (2) boost beneficiary employment (3) coordinate and message their beneficiaries (4) track data & impact (5) engage wider partners / employers. These organisations have freemium access with a tiered monthly / annual subscription depending upon the volume of features they'd like access to.

Employers / training providers: Organisations looking to mentor / hire / sponsor unconnected talent pay a monthly / annual subscription to (1) promote their opportunities to our users (2) see AI-match recommendations for their opportunities (3) engage and message unconnected talent (4) integrate their ATS (5) generate / remove bias from JDs (5) track their recruitment and social mobility impact.

We plan to reach £500k ARR by the end of 2024 by selling B2B subscriptions - if we keep our burn rate the same (~£35k) this will bring us to break-even.

We have almost surpassed 2023 revenue already (Jan-April) and we are ahead of our forecasts!