Meet Marco Nardone from Unii.com – Our Startup of the Week
Welcome to the fourth episode in the Elevator Pitch series 2.
Every week we’ll publish a 30 second pitch from 12 leading startups from across London. In this series we took the founders to the River Thames, aboard Canary Wharf’s speedboat for the most exciting pitch of their lives.
Back to school
Cast your mind back to 2005 when Facebook first hit Britain’s shores and spread through university campuses across the country.
Uploading all those photos from nights out and witty immature status updates only to find they come back to haunt you as an adult.
Social networking without mum and dad
Unii.com is a social network specifically for university students allowing access only to those with a university email address.
Parents, family members and employers won’t be seeing your habits at university from here.
Seed and series A funded
The site has already received seed and series A funding, backed by a number of prominent (but undisclosed) high-net-worth-individuals.
The current version offers job adverts, society pages, local deals to its student users and has thousands of users signed up.
It also allows students to break down the news feed into friends, university colleagues, UK posts and wider.
Freshers’ week
Its the start of the university season and many students will be heading back to get stuck into their courses (or procrastinating on social media).
Founder Marco Nardone told us this is a key time for Unii.com:
Freshers Week is obviously a huge focus within the Unii.com year as the undergraduates get settled on their courses.
Facebook clone?
The website is clearly under some top international competition, but this doesn’t faze the team:
I personally never see Facebook as a competitor – large, amorphous social networks cannot offer tailored services to a specific niche market like we do.
Check back next Tuesday for the next episode of the Elevator Pitch.