European tech ecosystems are contending with a shrinking talent pool, while demand for digital skills remains at record levels. 

That’s the problem that Niya, a London-based startup, is trying to solve, and it’s just raised a £1.5m pre-seed round to further develop its product and scale up its users. 

The round came from angel investors including Simon Murdoch, managing partner at Episode 1 Ventures, Ladi Greenstreet, Natwest’s Head of Strategic Investments and Co-CEO of Diversity VC and Xavier Sarras, Founding Partner of 4P Capital— as well as through a non-dilutive grant from Google’s philanthropic arm, Google.org. 

The company has built an AI-powered career management platform to help refugees, migrants and people from low-income backgrounds progress in their careers via upskilling, mentoring and employment opportunities.

The prize of getting bright people — who don’t typically progress through pre-existing education, training and career paths — into tech jobs could be a big one. In the UK, 93% of businesses report an IT skills gap within the job market, according to a 2023 survey of 500 businesses by Forbes. 

But can one small startup make a difference in such a big structural problem?

Helping corporates set up talent pipelines 

Niya cofounder and CEO Hugh Chichester says that there is “a lot of underutilisation of labour in the migrant population in particular” due to various barriers that prevent migrants from accessing opportunities in the UK.

One is a lack of networks which open doors to job opportunities; another is getting overseas qualifications recognised in the UK. A third barrier is knowing how the labour market operates and where to find opportunities.

Niya’s AI tool helps match users with training, services and job opportunities. The company says it currently works with 200 corporates and SMEs. Tech giants IBM, Salesforce, Cisco, SAP, Microsoft and Barclays are among Niya’s corporate partners that provide training courses for candidates on the platform.

Niya finds candidates via non-profit organisations, charities and even Discord groups and invites them to sign up to its platform where they are then assessed and matched with appropriate opportunities.

Companies looking for talent can pay to subscribe to a talent pipeline built by Niya (for example, a talent pipeline could consist of cloud practitioners with AWS skills in London) where they get reports on the best candidates coming through. From September, Niya will be launching a hiring fee model for those who want to hire via the platform, but don’t want to subscribe. 

“We’re actually seeing [user] referrals increasing, which is one of our… key metrics to track, because the success of the business really hinges on leveraging network effects,” says Chichester. “The virality of the platform will be critical as we go from seed to Series A.”

With the new funding, Niya wants to build out its platform to include important services such as credit and finance as well as helping with housing and visas. It also plans to expand to Europe, where it is already working with some businesses in Romania, Moldova and the Nordics.

Engaging angel investors 

Niya raised mostly from angel investors — some of which are founders who have previously exited businesses — as it wanted to tap into the networks of those well-connected individuals to help the platform grow. 

“You get better terms from angel investors and, at such an early stage, it’s helpful as a founder to have the freedom to test a few different models. We tested about three different models… and angels were a lot more patient with us,” says Chichester.

Angels also seemed more willing to understand the problem Niya is trying to solve than VCs.

“I had VCs feed back saying ‘soften the language around migrants’,” says Chichester. 

“There’s a lot of incredible entrepreneurs who are migrants,” he continues. “If you pitch it to them, they get it immediately. And that was just partly what the difference was: a lot of our angel investors have had experience in what it’s like to go into a new market. I think a lot of the VC investors we spoke to haven’t had that life change.”

“There was less friction with founders,” he adds, “especially those who themselves have lived experience of what we’re trying to address.”

Immigration is likely to be one of the key political issues for parties in the UK general election coming up in July. The Conservative government has already implemented a series of reforms this year designed to curb net migration to the country — raising concerns among the startup community about their ability to hire talent.

With Niya, Chichester says there is a future opportunity to engage with the UK government to show them how important migrants are to the success of the economy and tech sector, and that there are opportunities to “plug them into jobs”.

He points out that 62% of US and UK unicorns have been built by first or second-generation startups.

“There is a way that we can ensure that we are bringing in people who are set up for success in the UK, that integrate into the labour market, that become a tax benefit, not a tax burden,” he says. “The key to societal integration of migrants is jobs.”