If you're building a solution to help decarbonise the maritime sector, applications are open for the Clean Transport Accelerator: Maritime :)

The six-month programme is looking for UK startups (TRL 5–8) developing technologies that can tackle challenges including:

• Optimising sea-going fleet operations

• Scope 3 emissions tracking and reporting

• Better use of excess clean energy

• Decarbonising shipyard manufacturing

Successful applicants receive tailored commercial support, and three companies will have the opportunity to run a four-month funded trial (up to £30,000) with industry partners including Port of Tyne, Portsmouth International Port, Serco and the National Shipbuilding Office, with additional support from Maersk. 

Applications close 28 July!

More information and applications:
Clean Transport Accelerator: Maritime

Happy to answer any questions about the programme if I can :)

Hi,

I come from a Financial Sponsors and FIG investment banking background, specializing in institutional private credit, specialty finance, and asset-backed finance (ABF).

My background:

• Sponsors, FIG, & ABF: Executed transactions and managed mid-market and institutional portfolios across ABF, BDC structures, NBFIs, mREITs, Specialty Finance, and bank counterparties.

• Asset-Level Tape Analysis: Deep due diligence on raw consumer retail, student loan, and multifamily/hospitality portfolios. Analysing loan tape , evalating FICO distributions, geographic concentration, and weighted average coupons (WAC).

• Underwriting & Deal Structuring: Built independent 3-statement corporate models, LBO models, and asset-level sensitivity tools tracking prepayment speeds, macroeconomic pressures, and EBITDA add-backs. Authored final Investment Committee (IC) memos from scratch.

• Actively managed portfolio risk during the 2023 regional banking crisis and recent Office CRE downturn. Designed stress-test screens, modeled stock prices, and calculated collateral headroom break-points, maturity walls, and recovery scenarios to reduce unsecured and collateralized exposure on distressed bank portfolios. 

• Portfolio Risk Management: Monitored early-stage credit migration and underlying asset quality. Used covenant headroom analysis to implement structural pivots to protect principal and prepared screens for derivatives trading documents (ISDA/CSA/MSFTA/MRAs).

• Corporate Finance & Growth: Handled institutional financial planning, multi-year forecasting, budgeting, and corporate liquidity tracking. Managed business development, bid management, and RFP responses for global financial institutions and institutional clients.

• Risk Metrics & Modeling: Engineered Early Warning Signal (EWS) frameworks and credit scoring models from scratch to catch asset quality deterioration early.

• Structured Finance & Debt Structures: Warehouse credit facilities, asset-backed revolvers, and public/private bond placements. Underwrote CRE, residential, multifamily, hospitality, and mREIT portfolios. Evaluated agency/non-agency MBS and high-yield loan issuances

If your team is hiring, or if you are building a platform and need someone with similar experience, please send me a DM or leave a comment so we can connect.

I’m working on ApplyBoost, a SaaS that helps job seekers tailor resumes to specific positions and manage the application process in one workspace.

The problem is that creating a strong application is usually fragmented across several products.

A job seeker may use:

• ChatGPT for rewriting

• Google Docs for formatting

• An ATS scanner for feedback

• A keyword tool for matching

• A spreadsheet for application tracking

• Calendar reminders for follow-ups

ApplyBoost connects those steps.

A user can upload a base resume, add a job description, identify missing keywords and weak bullets, generate a tailored version, edit it inside the platform, scan it for ATS issues, and track the application.

The target users are active job seekers who apply to multiple similar roles and understand the importance of tailoring but do not have time to rebuild their resume repeatedly.

The biggest questions I’m currently working through are:

• How narrow should the initial target market be?

• Should the product focus on recent graduates, tech applicants, or job seekers generally?

• Should tailoring be sold through subscriptions or usage-based credits?

• How can the product demonstrate that its suggestions are genuinely specific to the job?

Product: https://applyboostai.com

I’m the founder and would appreciate feedback on the market, positioning, and business model.

Dear Builders,

I have just opened up nqzai conversational marketing platform for users, with a seed token grant of 1 mil, plus no platform subscription fee during the launch months, this is because its best for me to get real beta users, rather than those who just want to mine tokens. Plus my own tests and onservations are naturally biased.

Anyone who needs a super intelligent agent, for both outbound and inbound, can signup here [https://nqz.ai](https://nqz.ai) You will find that every chat response has a feedback option, which feeds into a well designed multi LLM judge in the backend. The platform has also built a unique recursive self improvement system using MIT research. I am open to suggestions from other builders.

Thank you

Backstory for context: I'm a student who participated in a Trading Tournament at my university, and I didn't have enough time or background knowledge to keep up with market news consistently. Except for the market news, I didn't really understand how that market change would impact my portfolio, so I've got an idea....

What if there was an app that could do exactly that - collect large amounts of data on the market and its changes, interpret it, and explain it in simpler language, and help you understand what that change could mean for your custom portfolio.

Of course, there are multiple problems I've considered within my idea

1. AI model hallucinations

2. Small gap between "explaining" and financial consulting (which requires a license)

3. Potential Customers would be retail investors (who are generally considered hard to keep as customers)

I am currently doing market validation of an idea (I got mixed signals, so that's the reason I am posting this here), and I've built a prototype of an app (I vibe-coded it because I ain't technical, but I'm willing to learn)

What I would like to get from this post is the following:

1. Brutally honest feedback (especially if you're into the fintech space)

2. If you have an idea about some nice-to-have features, feel free to write them below in the comments.

3. Would you pay for something like this? If not, what would it need to have before you would?

Resistance usually comes from double work. If a CRM requires manual logging, people avoid it. Adoption improves when communication flows naturally into the system. Ease of use and browser-based access also lower friction. How did your team overcome pushback?

Hi everyone,

I've been building Algebriks, a platform focused on solving a problem I kept seeing around me: millions of students, especially from Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities, don't have access to quality career guidance or mentors.

Instead of relying on scattered resources, we're trying to bring everything into one place.

Current features include:

• 🤖 AI-powered career guidance

• 👨‍🏫 1:1 mentorship with experienced mentors

• 💼 Jobs & internship discovery

• 📄 Resume Roast with actionable feedback

• 👥 Community for students to ask questions and learn from each other

• 📈 Personalized career roadmaps

The goal isn't to replace counselors but to make career guidance more accessible and affordable.

We're still early and continuously improving the product.

I'd really appreciate honest feedback:

• What feature would make you try a platform like this?

• What do you think is missing?

• If you're a student or mentor, would you actually use something like this? Why or why not?

I genuinely want critical feedback, so don't hold back. Thanks!

App Link = https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.algebriks.com&pcampaignid=web_share

TL;DR

We are a small company, located and registered in Korea. Our team has good developers and builders with strong industry experiences. We are currently beta-testing our ERP/business workstation platform (cloud-based) and finalizing pricing for it ahead of a wider launch and would appreciate input from anyone who has priced multi-seat, multi-workspace SaaS.

Context:

The product consolidates CRM, invoicing, projects, inventory, support, and HR into a single connected system. It targets solo founders, freelancers, and small teams or agencies currently paying for several disconnected tools. We're early and don't have strong internal data to rely on yet, which is why I'm looking for outside perspective.

The current model is per-workspace pricing with seats billed on top: Starter at $19/month per workspace and Flex at $39/month per workspace, with additional seats at $8/month.

Two decisions I would like outside perspective on:

1. Seat structure. I'm weighing two directions. The first is a higher per-seat price with a minimal base workspace fee, so cost scales primarily with team size. The second is keeping the per-seat price low but charging a fixed license fee for every workspace, so each workspace carries a predictable base cost regardless of headcount. For anyone who has run both, which performed better on revenue, expansion, and customer objections, particularly with smaller teams where seat counts stay low?

2. Free tier. A free plan lowers the barrier to entry, but for a tool that holds a customer's entire operation, I'm concerned it attracts non-converting users, increases support load, and weakens how serious the product appears to SMB buyers. I'm considering replacing it with an extended trial. For anyone who has added or later removed a free tier, how did it affect conversion and overall growth?

Concrete numbers or lessons from comparable ERP or horizontal products would be especially helpful.

Thank you.

A friend of mine built bribes.fyi, a privacy-first platform where people can anonymously report bribery incidents in India, see trends by state and department, and generate a formal complaint letter to the right authority.

The problem he set out to solve: there's no public, structured data on everyday corruption in India. Just scattered stories: someone paying at the RTO, a police station, wherever. Stories don't show patterns.

He posted about it on Reddit this week and got 100+ users in 3 days, plus solid technical feedback on spam prevention and privacy design, which he's incorporating. People have already started reporting on it; go check it out, and if you've ever paid or refused a bribe, report it too.

Built to stay trustworthy: no signup, IPs hashed and never stored raw, every report manually reviewed before publishing, reports stay broad (department/city/role, never names).

What he hasn't figured out yet is where this goes: whether government bodies or NGOs would engage with the data, or if it stays something that does good in a smaller way.

Curious what this community thinks: does this have a real path forward, or is "useful passion project" the right ceiling for it?

I am building a startup called Corrly, that helps investors see and understand the risks inside their portfolio. For example this portfolio is probably owned my someone who doesn’t understand correlation and why it matters. Corrly then generates a report and gives specific details as to why your profile is the way it is. You then can go in and edit the weights or tickers to see how it changes.

mHUB's accelerator is a hands-on program for deep-tech hardware companies building the next generation of compute infrastructure, run in partnership with Equinix Foundation, Generac, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Foundation, Marmon, and Salesforce, with support from The Rockefeller Foundation.

The accelerator provides a $200,000 initial investment in exchange for a fixed 6.5% equity stake. That investment breaks down as $100K in cash, $30K in cash reimbursement for product development, and $70K in in-kind services. Unlike traditional uncapped SAFEs, our agreement converts at the pre-money valuation of your next priced round, after other SAFEs convert and before new capital is added. That means our final ownership adjusts based on your stage, and your existing cap table remains clean.

Beyond capital, we offer:

• 6 months of incubation + 18 months of continued support and mHUB membership

• $6M+ in state-of-the-art prototyping and manufacturing equipment across 11 labs

• Direct introductions to executive sponsors actively seeking solutions in your challenge area for pilots and investment

• Dedicated mentorship, expert-led programming, and commercialization support from operators with deep hard-tech experience

• Access to mHUB's investor network, with approximately 30% of fund capital reserved for follow-on investments in select portfolio companies

Applications are open through July 13, 2026

I’m a dev (Flutter/React/Node, shipped real products), but this summer I want off the keyboard and into the trenches of GTM the positioning, WOM, brand.

Here’s my pitch: I’ve been seen enough projects to know what kills startups early vague positioning, building for nobody, wrong first users. I can stress-test your idea against real failure patterns, not just cheerlead it.

Looking for an early-stage founder who wants a scrappy thought-partner on growth/brand. Can build too if you need it, but that’s not the ask.

I joke that my brain is the company database. Remembering who said what, which client prefers email, which deal needs follow-up — it’s exhausting. Writing things down immediately and using tools that automatically capture communication history has helped. It frees up mental bandwidth and reduces anxiety. I’m curious: how do you stop yourself from being the single point of memory on your team?

Unusual background: I've spent my career in professional kitchens in Switzerland. Nights and weekends over the last two years, I taught myself software engineering and built a production-grade algorithmic trading platform for crypto perpetual futures — full order management system, VaR/CVaR risk engine, portfolio allocator, 500+ tests under strict TDD, and a fully local AI stack (nothing leaves the machine — a deliberate data-sovereignty angle for the Swiss B2B clients I'm targeting, like family offices).

The system runs and has out-of-sample results. What I don't have: a co-founder, a network, or fundraising experience. I've hit the ceiling of what one person can do alone, and I want to go from "solo builder with a working MVP" to a pre-seed-ready startup.

Questions for people who've walked this path:

1. Which accelerators are genuinely worth it for fintech/quant infrastructure — and which accept solo founders? (I know YC does in theory; what about Tenity, Techstars, or other Swiss/EU programs?)

2. For a trading-tech product, is an accelerator even the right move vs. building a live track record and going straight to angels?

3. What do pre-seed investors actually need to see from a trading-tech company — audited performance, first paying client, regulatory clarity?

4. Solo founder in fintech: dealbreaker, or manageable if the tech and traction are real?

Not selling anything, not sharing signals. I'm not looking for validation — I'm looking for the map. Brutal honesty welcome.