St Paul’s School has announced the launch of ESTER, the first incubator in the UK to be based at a secondary school.
St Paul’s School has pioneered an innovative entrepreneurship programme called Start It, which teaches sustainable entrepreneurship and innovation skills. Created by Nick Troen (1998-03), Head of Entrepreneurship at St Paul’s School, Start It recently launched ESTER with the financial support of St Paul’s, the Old Pauline Club and The Mercers’ Company. ESTER is the first incubator in the UK to be based at a secondary school.
ESTER is designed to help early-stage start-ups with a sustainable concept at their core to succeed by providing resources, seed funding, mentoring and training through an extensive network of industry champions. Eligible applicants to the programme come from the West London Partnership group of schools and must be 18+ at the time of application.
Start It prepares students for this and, after the one-year ESTER incubation programme, options to seek out higher levels from our network of angel investors and venture capitalists become available.
Four companies have successfully come through the programme, with the goal to expand to double figures over the next two years:
Founded by Huw Siddle (2008-13) and his business partner Calum Miller, this personal assistant service aims to free up the valuable time of professionals at relatively low costs compared to current competitors. Huw is looking for anyone with a Software as a Service (SaaS) background, as well as general digital online marketing expertise. Life, formally launched in June, has started generating revenue and has created a coupon, STPAULS15 which gives 15% off a monthly subscription for any plan.
Founded by Kayyan Elmasry (2017-22), a student at LSE, GreenStar aims to provide a chrome extension to identify the true sustainability of products. Kayyan is looking for anyone with a background in software, database management and sustainability to assist him. The business is in very early stages.
Founded by Ansh Tandon (2020-22), this startup aims to deliver a B2B SaaS healthcare data-brokering platform that helps users retrieve inaccessible biomedical databases. Ansh has a mentor but if you have a particular interest in healthcare startups please let Nick Troen know and he can put you in touch with Ansh to further help support his business.
Founded by Will Englander (2009-14), Root.co sells organic, high quality ginger beer soft drinks. Will recently featured on ‘Aldi’s next big thing’ on Channel 4 and has developed healthy revenue over the last year.
Currently all four entrepreneurs are Old Paulines, but it is the school’s aim to encourage applications from across our partner schools, including St Paul’s Girls School. Excitingly, Young Enterprise (the largest entrepreneurial educational organisation in the UK) have also requested that ESTER be offered to their alumni, opening up the incubator to a national audience of young entrepreneurs. Young Enterprise recently made Nick Troen a London regional ambassador for their programme in recognition of the steps taken to improve access to entrepreneurship and business education across schools in West London.
ESTER is looking for new companies to support. For more information, please email Nick Troen on npt@stpaulsschool.org.uk