The Bluebox Blog

Tuesday, 14 April 2026

At Bluebox, a mid-market corporate finance advisory firm in London, we regularly feature founders building businesses with genuine purpose and commercial momentum. The Entrepreneur Series shines a spotlight on the people behind high-growth companies, exploring the ideas, turning points, and strategies that drive long-term value creation.

Apprentago was founded by Carlo Weaver with a simple but powerful mission: ensure no young person has to find their future on the sixth page of Google. Born from Carlo’s own experience of being homeless at fifteen, navigating autism, and stumbling across a life-changing degree apprenticeship, the platform has grown to over 500,000 registered students, 80+ schools, 50+ employer partners, and 30 million organic TikTok views, now backed by the government’s £850 million Youth Guarantee fund.

What makes Apprentago compelling is the sophistication of its model: a three-sided marketplace connecting young people, employers, and educational institutions, embedded into the UK’s careers education infrastructure at a national level.

In this Entrepreneur Series interview, Carlo shares the origins of Apprentago, the pivotal moments that shaped its growth, and the lessons learned building a purpose-led technology business from the ground up.

Q1) Let’s start at the beginning. What inspired you to launch Apprentago, and what problem were you determined to solve?

My biggest inspiration was the struggle I went through as a fifteen year old. I was homeless with my mum for eight months in Ilford East London, dealing with a world with no routine as a kid with autism, I never sat my GCSEs when I was homeless which made me fail them all and with navigating my mum’s poor mental health at the time. It was a really dark period.

But I got lucky. I found a degree apprenticeship at NatWest on the sixth page of Google. That one opportunity took me to co-managing an £83 Million Pound Portfolio in my Nans Council House and off Universal Credit to a £30,000 starting salary at nineteen with  my university degree fully paid for debt free.

Even writing that back I pinch myself as I had no GCSEs, no roof over my head, navigating the world with Diagnosed Autism, caring for my mum and nan plus I had terrible social anxiety. Realistically, that should have been it for me.

But it wasn’t, and that’s the point. I was lucky enough to find it, let alone land it. Most people aren’t.

The more I looked around, the more I realised people weren’t failing to get apprenticeships because they weren’t capable , they just couldn’t find them. So the problem I was determined to solve was simple: no one else should have to find their future on the sixth page of Google. Everyone deserves access to this information, and the tools to actually land the opportunity.

That’s literally where the name comes from , find an apprenticeship, and go with it. Apprentago.

Q2) What was your original vision for Apprentago, and how has that evolved as the business has grown?

My original vision was simple , be the biggest platform where young people can find, learn, and land an apprenticeship. And I was going to build it through TikTok.

When I first had the idea, I posted about it on LinkedIn. Three people liked it. One of them was me. It nearly made me cry. So I thought, right, let’s try TikTok. At the time, nobody was really on there showing what their working life actually looked like. So I did a day in the life of an investment banking apprentice with autism. That first video got over fifty thousand views.

From there it evolved into making content for companies , a day in the life at DHL, what a career in finance looks like if you’re neurodiverse at KPMG. Most people would write DHL off as not very sexy, but when you get into the reality of it, it’s actually fascinating. That was our edge , we weren’t recruiters, we were storytellers. Employers would pay us to make TikToks instead of paying a recruiter. We had the platform, we had the audience, and we had the content. That visibility grew to the point where for National Apprenticeship Week, Channel 4 gave us a sole feature interview , which for a one year old startup at the time still pinches me when I think about it.

But then we started asking , what about the teachers? The parents? The government? And that’s when we identified what we now call the educators.

When I started Apprentago, everyone laughed. They said UCAS would come into the space and kill us. You’re just an autistic kid, what are you going to do? But what we discovered was that schools had a real need for our technology , they just weren’t who we’d originally built it for. And the truth is, I had zero careers help at college. None. I didn’t know anyone who had a proper job growing up. My college promised me a job and delivered nothing. I had to figure it all out myself.

So we evolved the software into what we now call a careers productivity tool for educators , schools and colleges who need to actually track what’s happening with their students, their apprenticeship applications, and now their work experience too. We have over eighty schools using the platform. We work with Combined Authorities and we’re now funded through the Youth Guarantee, which is a brand new £850 million pot of government funding for exactly this kind of infrastructure.

And we’ve brought work experience into the vision because the reality is, an apprenticeship , especially a degree apprenticeship , is hard to get. And if you’ve had no work experience, you’re starting from zero. I’ve met brilliant, driven young people who wanted to be lawyers, got onto the apprenticeship, started the job, and quit within two weeks because they thought it was going to be like Suits. Work experience changes that.

We’ve now had over thirty million views on careers content. All thirty million TikTok views are completely organic. Not a penny spent on paid promotion. Over fifty employers have used the platform. The TikToks still happen. That’s all great. But what I realised was that none of that was making a real societal difference on its own.

But what really changed everything was when we stopped thinking about Apprentago as just a platform and started thinking about it as a triangle.

At the centre of that triangle is always the young person. And what Apprentago gives that young person is genuinely powerful. They can search and find apprenticeships near them, build a CV using AI, track every single application they’ve sent in real time, and use our AI career coach to prepare for upcoming interviews. All in one place. All free. That’s the UCAS experience but built for apprenticeships with now having 500,000 total students on the platform.

Around that young person are three sides that all have to work together.

On one side you have employers , companies who want to hire young people, want to show them what they actually do, and want the simplest possible way to manage their vacancies and find the right people locally. Recruiting costs alone are now around £6,000 per vacancy. Apprentago removes that cost entirely for the basics and gives them the tools to do it themselves.

On another side you have what we call the educators , schools, colleges, careers leaders, even parents , who want to support their students but genuinely can’t see what’s going on. They don’t know who’s applied for what, who’s got an interview, who’s struggling. We give them a system that saves them time, boosts their careers productivity, and paints a clear picture of what’s actually happening for every single student.

And at the top of the triangle is the government , combined authorities, careers hubs, regional bodies , who hold the funding and the mandate but have no digital infrastructure to deliver on it. They’re the ones who make this scalable nationally.

The vision is still exactly what it always was. Every young person should be able to find local opportunities near them, learn how to prepare using AI to speed up that process not replace it, and land a role that could genuinely transform their life. We’ve just built the infrastructure around that young person to make it actually happen.

Q3) What have been some of the most defining or pivotal moments in Apprentago’s journey so far?

There are two that genuinely stop me in my tracks when I think about them. Actually, there are three.

The first was getting my angel investment from Richard Waddington. Richard is an exited founder , he built First Agency up to over eight hundred staff globally before exiting. He was the first person to put real money into Apprentago. We raised £20,000 SEIS to get this started. That’s it. Twenty thousand pounds. And what Richard brought was worth far more than the capital was his mentorship,  because he has the lived experience of building and exiting a real business and that knowledge is genuinely invaluable when you’re a kid from Ilford trying to figure all of this out. And what made that moment hit so hard was the context around it. Two months before Richard came in, someone I’d pitched to, someone I genuinely respected,  told me that autistic people shouldn’t run companies, that my idea was crap, and that I was wasting my time. That was devastating. I won’t pretend otherwise. So when Richard came in and said, right, I’m here, I believe in this, here’s my experience and backing , that wasn’t just investment. That was validation. That was proof that the idea was real and that I was the right person to build it.

The second was the day the platform went live. February the thirteenth, twenty twenty five. We rushed it out the day before Valentine’s Day because, well, I had to get it done before I could enjoy the weekend with my girlfriend. That was my little love gift to myself.

But watching that platform go live , something we had built entirely from scratch in house, which was incredibly hard , at the exact same moment our Channel 4 interview dropped, we went live on BBC Radio London, and we posted a TikTok that got four hundred thousand views. People came pouring in. We weren’t just a WordPress website anymore. This was a real product, built properly, and the world could see it.

A thousand people signed up on day one. Deutsche Bank came on board almost immediately after launch , they’d never worked with anyone in the apprenticeship TikTok space before and they’ve since left a testimonial on our website. A year later, during National Apprenticeship Week 2026, twenty three thousand people logged into their accounts in a single week.

And then the messages started coming in within the first few days. From young people saying things like “this platform has saved my life” and “I’ve just got a job I never thought I’d get.” We were still an MVP. The product wasn’t even finished. But it was already changing lives and that, honestly, is the whole point.

The third moment is one I still can’t quite believe happened. I was invited to stay overnight at Windsor Castle to take part in a roundtable on the future of careers education alongside British Airways, NatWest, and Amazon. I gave a mini keynote speech in the same room that Napoleon once spoke in. I’m a kid from Ilford with autism and no GCSEs. That room was not supposed to have someone like me in it. And after the evening finished, one of the Military Knights of Windsor gave me a private night time tour of the cathedral. It was spectacular. Genuinely one of those moments where you have to stop and ask yourself how on earth you got there , and then remember exactly why you built this in the first place.

Q4) The apprenticeship landscape is constantly evolving. What have been some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced while building the business?

There have been a few, and I’ll be honest about all of them.

The first is the one nobody tells you about when you start a business , the near giving up moment. Summer of last year, we’d had a great launch, money had come in, and then all of a sudden it dried up completely. We needed to pivot fast. We realised that employers are incredibly seasonal and that trying to sell a piece of technology and a piece of marketing to the same person in the same business was really difficult. We also realised we were thinking about revenue the wrong way. Wouldn’t it be easier to sell a £20,000 package five times than a £5,000 package twenty times? That shift in thinking changed everything for us.

The second challenge was competing with industry giants and being constantly compared to platforms we’re not really competing with. People compared us to UCAS, to Not Going To Uni, to Rate My Apprenticeship. And I’d think, hang on , those platforms only show you opportunities from employers who pay to be listed. We’re trying to democratise all of this information and make it free. In terms of reach for apprenticeships specifically, I genuinely believe we’re now bigger than all of them. But getting people to see that when you’re a startup took time.

Going into schools brought its own challenge , being constantly compared to Unifrog. Unifrog is fundamentally a university platform that bolted apprenticeships on as an afterthought. Ours is built purely for careers, apprenticeships, and work experience from the ground up. But what actually ended up setting us apart wasn’t an argument , it was the data. We already had over three hundred thousand students sign up to Apprentago before we ever went into schools. The students were already there. The teachers found out how good Apprentago was through reverse osmosis , their own students were telling them. And then we found out through a client that only three percent of all active Unifrog users use Unifrog outside of school hours. Three percent. Our most active time on the platform is between nine and ten PM at night. Because young people aren’t searching for their future during a Tuesday morning form period when a teacher tells them to. They’re doing it late at night on their phone when it actually matters to them. That’s why TikTok wins. That’s why Apprentago wins. You can’t force genuine engagement and Unifrog never cracked that. We didn’t have to , the students came to us.

Then there was the corporate problem. We solved massive problems for some of the biggest companies in the country , half a million views on TikTok, all the candidates they wanted, real brand awareness , and some of them just never paid us. We gave it away and got a wall full of lovely logos out of it. Great for credibility, terrible for cash flow. That had to change.

Getting companies and schools to see this as a must have rather than a nice to have was a long road. Schools would say, yes this is great, but apprenticeships aren’t really our priority. And then the government mandate around work experience comes along and all of a sudden the phone starts ringing. Policy changed the game for us. The Prime Minister talking about apprenticeships, the fifty hours work experience requirement coming in , that turned a nice to have into an absolute necessity overnight.

I also nearly closed a big contract with the Greater London Authority last year. They told me it was a bad idea. A few months later the Youth Guarantee Trailblazer funding came along and now we’re working with Combined Authorities across the country. The no’s genuinely do become yes’s. You just have to survive long enough to see it.

And then there’s the personal side of it. I have autism and I thrive on routine. But building a startup destroys routine completely. I used to work twelve hour days every single day until I realised that less is more. Finding that balance took a long time. And on top of running the business I’m also a full time carer for my nan, which I don’t talk about enough but is a huge part of my life and something I carry alongside everything else.

The noise versus the signal is probably the overarching challenge through all of it. As Steve Jobs said, finding the truth in a room of a hundred people all saying different things. Everyone had an opinion on what Apprentago should be. Learning to filter that and back your own instincts , that’s the hardest skill I’ve had to develop as a founder. Because for a long time everyone thought it was stupid. And now those same people are saying, wow, we need this. The idea didn’t change. The policy did. And we were ready.

Q5) What differentiates Apprentago from other providers or platforms in the early careers space?

Everything we do starts with one principle , the young person is at the heart of everything. That’s what makes Apprentago different. Not a feature, not a price point, a philosophy. And everything else flows from that.

Let me break it down through what we call the Triangle of Engagement.

For the young person

We don’t gatekeep information. Every apprenticeship is on Apprentago. You can search and find opportunities near you, build a CV using AI, track every single application in real time, prepare for interviews with an AI career coach, and learn about companies and sectors through modern TikTok style video content , not fifteen minute corporate jargon that a fifteen year old will click off in thirty seconds. All of it free. All of it built by someone who has actually done an apprenticeship, who has a neurodiverse mind, who grew up with nothing and had to figure it all out alone. Not a fifty year old who decided apprenticeships were a good market to jump into.

Competitors like Not Going To Uni and HigherIn , better known as Rate My Apprenticeship , give the young person nothing except a job listing and a company profile that only big corporates can afford at around £6,000 a year for a static bit of text. Uptree does work experience but again you’re limited to only seeing the top one percent of corporate partners who pay to be on there. Great if you’re lucky enough to want to work at one of those companies. Useless if you’re not.

Apprentago democratises all of it. Apprenticeships, work experience, the tools to actually land them , in one single place, free, built for the people who need it most. Thats shown by having 500,000 students with accounts on our platform, 20,000 daily active users in January between 9-10pm at night whilst competitors cant get anyone to log on outside of school hours as its a chore but most of all 4,139 live apprenticeships on the platform right now

For employers

That same £6,000 that gets you a static listing on a competitor platform will, according to Reuters, get you on average just one hire for a single vacancy. One. Apprentago gives you the free listing, the free company profile, and the ability to manage your applicants , and then we can take that same budget and run a TikTok campaign that gets you diverse candidates from the right backgrounds, real brand awareness, and the kind of reach that replaces the need for a recruiter entirely. We’ve generated half a million views for single employer campaigns multiple times and delivered the diverse, qualified candidates employers actually want.

We charge £4,000 per video on the marketing side. Some videos take six hours. Some take forty five minutes. Either way we get paid to deliver results and that’s what we do. During National Apprenticeship Week , and don’t worry if you’ve never heard of it, most people haven’t , we ran the only official webinar with the Department for Education and the Department for Work and Pensions for the entire week. We promoted it exclusively on TikTok. Thirty minutes of work. Seven hundred and fifty sign ups. The maths on that is quite good.

And yes TikTok requires my presence as the founder. I’m comfortable with that. Even MrBeast , a billion dollar company, four hundred million  subscribers, the biggest creator on the planet , still has to be in every single video. That’s just how personal brand driven businesses work at this stage. But we’ve also entered a joint venture with TapLab, a creator marketing agency focused on university and apprenticeship TikTok content. Their creators make content for us organically which removes the bottleneck and builds the channel beyond just me.

For schools

I love this one because the reaction from teachers is always the same , “oh not another platform, we already use Unifrog and Morrisby.” When someone first mentioned Morrisby to me I genuinely thought they were talking about the singer from The Smiths.

I spoke with Blackpool Sixth Form recently , a really deprived area where potentially fifty percent of students could end up out of work. They were paying £3,000 a year for Morrisby. The careers leader told me not a single student uses it. It was a complete waste of money.

Unifrog is fine at what it does , helping students prepare for university. Albeit a bit clunky. But they’ve bolted apprenticeships on as an afterthought and it shows. E.ON told us recently that their Unifrog profile , something they have to pay for , gets virtually no views outside of school hours. Because Unifrog is a school tool. Kids use it because they have to, not because they want to.

Apprentago is used at all hours because nobody is forcing anyone onto it. Our most active hour is nine to ten PM on a Wednesday night. In January we hit twenty thousand concurrent live active users on the platform. Unifrog at that point was, as I like to say, napping on its lily pad.

And the price? Unifrog costs schools around £4,000 a year. Apprentago is £1,000. You just sign up with your school email and you’re linked. That’s it.

But more importantly Apprentago isn’t a learning platform. It’s a careers productivity system. The goal is to save careers leaders and teachers time , because no teacher should be sitting there asking themselves how many of their students have applied for work experience, whether everyone has a CV, what they can send them, or how they evidence all of it to Ofsted. Apprentago answers all of those questions automatically. Students make CVs with AI, track their apprenticeship and work experience journey in real time, log their work experience hours which is now a new government requirement, and the teacher gets a single report showing how all of that student activity maps to their Gatsby Benchmarks and destination data. One system. Not a platform. A system.

The more time a teacher gets back the better they can do their job. It sounds dead simple. But that’s the point.

For government

We are in the mess we’re in with youth unemployment because the existing players in this market are too comfortable where they are to solve it. Young people don’t have the right tools. Schools don’t have the right infrastructure. And the government has the funding but no digital mechanism to deliver on it. Apprentago fills that gap , not as a job board but as the operating system that connects all three.

And here’s what makes the commercial case for government genuinely simple. One purchase unlocks Apprentago for every school and college in an entire region in one fell swoop. A hundred schools across one region is £100,000 for two years , effectively a fifty percent discount when you break it down per school per year. Compare that to Unifrog or Morrisby at £4,000 per school , four times the price, and platforms that aren’t even focused on apprenticeships or work experience. With Apprentago that same regional investment funds new development tailored to that region’s specific skills strategy, and gives the Combined Authority something none of the existing platforms can offer , real time data on what is actually going on. Who is applying. Who is getting interviews. Who is falling through the gaps. For the first time, a region can actually see its own talent pipeline

And then there’s UCAS. Yes they care about apprenticeships but let’s be honest , apprenticeships make very little money compared to their university admissions service which is their entire business model. And with degree apprenticeships about to get harder to come by , universities who act as training providers are leaving the market due to the removal of Level 7 apprenticeship funding for over twenty ones , UCAS will quietly wind down their apprenticeship focus because the economics simply don’t support it. That’s not a criticism, it’s just reality. For them apprenticeships are a side dish. For Apprentago it’s the whole menu.

This year our target is £300,000 in government contracts. That’s not our ceiling , that’s our floor for what the Combined Authority model can deliver in year one of it working properly. We are already in active conversation with three further Combined Authorities beyond our first and have Job Centre conversations happening in certain regions too , which is an entirely different pot of government funding altogether. And I’ll be honest about where the business is right now , last year’s revenue doesn’t tell the story of where we are because frankly it’s a different business. We’ve transitioned from a marketing service into a technology platform with government funding behind it. Comparing the two would be like comparing a bicycle to a car because they both have wheels. The real story starts now.

So in summary , we just do everything better, easier, and cheaper. For young people, for employers, for schools, and for government. And we do it because the person who built it actually needed it once. That’s the difference.

Q6) How do you balance commercial growth with the social impact element of apprenticeships?

You’d think this is where I’d give you a big corporate answer and dodge the question. I’m not going to do that.

The honest answer is we’ve designed the business model so that when one grows, the other grows with it. They’re not in tension. They’re the same horse pulling the same cart.

Actually, it’s more like two Belgian horses.

One Belgian horse can pull eight thousand pounds on its own. Impressive. But when you pair two Belgian horses together and train them as a team, they don’t just double the load , they pull twenty four to thirty five thousand pounds. The whole becomes far greater than the sum of its parts because they compete with and push each other forward at the same time.

That’s exactly how commercial growth and social impact work at Apprentago. They’re intertwined. When one moves, the other moves with it.

And the model doesn’t revolve around me being in every room. We sell to Combined Authorities who deploy Apprentago into every school in their region through their existing Careers Hub infrastructure. They handle the in person relationships. We deliver the technology, host webinars, and drive awareness through TikTok marketing. One authority. One contract. A hundred schools. Potentially a million new student accounts overnight. No army of salespeople needed. We already have a Combined Authority doing exactly this right now through the Youth Guarantee Fund , a close to £1 billion pot of new government funding that matches exactly what Apprentago has always been about. Getting young people into apprenticeships and work experience.

When we win a government contract, a hundred schools get access to our software overnight. Many of those students would never have found us otherwise. One commercial deal. One fell swoop. Lives changed at scale.

When National Grid pays us to make a TikTok campaign, six hundred and fifty thousand young people on TikTok see what a career in energy actually looks like. We get paid. They get their eyes opened to an industry they’d never considered. Commercial transaction. Life changed. Same moment.

That’s the model. There’s no balancing act because there’s nothing to balance. The bigger we grow commercially the more young people we reach. The more young people we reach the more valuable we become commercially. Two horses. One direction. Pulling something far heavier than either could manage alone.

Q7) What advice would you give to founders building businesses in regulated or policy-driven sectors?

When I first started Apprentago I had absolutely no idea of the political and education landscape I was operating in. I didn’t even know I was operating in one. I just knew the problem I wanted to solve. And I had to do a serious amount of reading, studying, and asking questions before I understood the system well enough to build something that actually fit inside it.

My advice is simple , learn the rules of the game you’re playing and make them work in your favour.

For me that meant three things.

First, I had to understand employers. Not just the surface level funding rules of how an apprenticeship works, but actually getting on calls with everyone from Sandhurst Solicitors to KPMG and asking them , why are you hiring apprentices? What does it actually give you? Where is your money being wasted? Early careers is not a revenue generating area for most businesses. It’s an investment into a future workforce, and investments don’t always pay back a great dividend. Once I understood that problem properly our TikTok solution made complete sense to them , because we could get them the right diverse candidates and the brand awareness at a fraction of the cost of traditional recruitment.

Second, I had to understand government. That meant looking at what specific ministers and heads of departments were actually saying, getting on calls with people like the head of careers for the West Midlands, and asking questions with one goal in mind , where can I add value here? Not pitching. Just listening and summarising.

Third, I had to understand schools. Learning everything they’re statutorily required to do and then asking , if we did X, would that help you with Y? Why do apprenticeships actually matter to you? The answers shaped the product more than any amount of time sat at a laptop coding features.

I give a lot of credit to my partner for this. She’s a social researcher and honestly watching how she approaches questions and evaluates outcomes taught me how to conduct what were essentially mini studies on each part of the market. That rigour changed how I thought about everything.

And the unfair advantage I found through all of that? My lived experience. I’ve played this game of chess not just as a knight moving the pieces , I’ve been the pawn on the board. I know what it feels like to be a young person with no information, no guidance, and no one in your corner. No amount of market research replicates that.

The moment I realised my lived experience was worth more than years of sector experience was when I looked at the problems everyone around me was struggling to solve and thought , I think I know how to fix that. And when the people with all the credentials and all the experience told me I was an idiot and it would never work, they couldn’t actually give me a strong reason why. They just didn’t like the answer. And that told me everything. My way of thinking was so different to theirs that there was a real chance I was onto something they couldn’t see. In a sector full of people who’ve spent their careers in policy and education but never actually needed the thing they’re building , that perspective is everything.

You can’t predict where policy is going to land. I never knew how relevant Apprentago would become to everything happening in government right now. But the advice is don’t give up before the policy catches up with your vision. Because sometimes the rules of the game change and suddenly everything you’ve been building is exactly what the moment needs.

Q8) As a founder, what have been your biggest personal lessons throughout this journey?

Patience is something I thought I had an abundance of. That was put to the test. You can’t rush greatness, I say.

Resilience too. A word I didn’t really grasp even though I’ve never had a conventional path in life. True resilience to me is said best by Vegeta in Dragon Ball Z “a warrior’s greatest strength is his ability to endure pain.” Feeling pain means you’re alive.

And the last one is something I live by, you’re never tired when you’re winning.

I’ve been boxing for over three years now and you learn quickly that winning is fun but pain is a teacher. No matter how you get hit, it’s always your fault. And when you’re winning it feels easy. But you can’t get lost in that feeling. The moment you think this is easy and get complacent, the next thing you know you’ve been hit.

That applies to being a founder more than anything else I’ve ever done. One minute it feels effortless. You get off a call, you make the sale, the feature you’ve been developing for months ships and users love it. Then the next day the person you were speaking to who was about to sign the deal has been sacked. Your new feature is broken because too many people used it at once and the server couldn’t handle it.

So what do you do? You make a list of every person at that firm and stop relying on a single point of contact. You jump into the code with your tech team to fix the feature and you make a TikTok saying it’s broken because too many people used it at once,  what made you use it in the first place? You take the pain and use it. That validation, even when it’s brutal, makes everything better.

But I’ve only learned all of that through making mistakes. Every single one of them.

Q9) Looking ahead, what excites you most about the future of Apprentago?

For me it’s working more and more with Combined and Local Authorities and solving problems regionally. Every region in the UK has its own unique challenges across every corner of our Triangle of Engagement, different employers, different school pressures, different young needs and wants, different government priorities. Seeing how our technology and marketing can fit into each of those regions differently and actually move the needle is what gets me out of bed. Seeing the impact we’re already making in the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority region is just the beginning of what that can look like at scale. We already have three further Combined Authorities in active conversation and Job Centre conversations happening in certain regions too, which is a completely separate pot of government funding altogether.

This year our target is £300,000 in government contracts alone. That’s not our ceiling, that’s our floor. And the business has completely transformed to get here, we’re no longer a marketing service, we’re a technology platform with government infrastructure behind it. That changes everything about what’s possible.

One day I would really love to work with Job Centre Plus and have Apprentago become the default system that Work and Youth Coaches use to help young people into apprenticeships and work experience. We are already in conversations with some senior people there and work is coming our way. Give the people on the front line at the Job Centre a tool that actually helps them do their day to day job better. That to me is where the real societal impact lives — when the infrastructure of the state is using Apprentago to connect young people to opportunity.

And then there’s something that probably surprises people when I say it. Everyone talks about expanding to America or the Middle East. What genuinely excites me is China.  I want to go to China and show how our solution solved real problems around youth unemployment in the UK and explore how Apprentago could be implemented over there. That’s a conversation nobody else in this space is having and that’s exactly why it interests me.

That China conversation is already happening. We’ve met people at the House of Lords that run international business schools who are genuinely excited about what Apprentago could mean over there. We’ve been invited to the Guangzhou region in May to understand their school system firsthand. Right now in China students get one hour a week of career education. One hour. And their youth unemployment rate is sky high. Sound familiar? That’s exactly where we started in the UK

But ultimately the thing that excites me most is the simplest vision of all. The day when every young person in the UK , whether they want to be a builder or a banker , thinks of Apprentago first. That’s the goal. That’s always been the goal.

Quick Fire Questions

What’s one skill you wish you could instantly master?

“Cooking” I cook a lot, its creative and its only when you practice you realise that “There is levels to this game”

What’s been your proudest moment as a founder so far?

Launching the Apprentago platform. I never thought we’d actually get it out there. And seeing how it’s changed some people’s lives because of something I thought of sitting on the floor of my nan’s front room watching The Chase is still a pinch me moment.

If you could give your younger self one piece of advice, what would it be?

Invest in Nvidia! No, it would be to listen more. You may think you know it all but in reality you know nothing Jon Snow”

What’s a book, podcast or resource that’s influenced your entrepreneurial journey

Nothing influenced me other than my own curiosity and desire to solve a problem I personally faced.

If you could meet anyone (past or present), who would it be and why?

MR Beast (Jimmy Donaldson) He is the best marketer in the world in my opinion. I would say to him:

“Jimmy, I was homeless with my mum for eight months. I failed every exam when I left school. I have autism. The only reason my life changed is because I found an apprenticeship buried on page six of Google. Most kids never even see that opportunity.

I now run a platform called Apprentago that helps young people find and land apprenticeships across the UK.

What if MrBeast became the first creator to hire 10 apprentices in the UK and we film the entire journey from application to first paycheck? I’ll build and run the entire system.

You take the first 10. I’ll scale it to 10,000 in 12 months with a live public tracker.”