Who is Excelerate?

Still not sure how, but I got Christian Werner (CTO) and John Carty (COO) to join as co-founders. We began building the platform, and in November 2019, our completely unpolished BETA version went LIVE.

On March 11, the universities closed due to Corona. It had a huge impact, and we had a very hard time reaching the students. At the same time, John had to step away from Excelerate. Later in the year, Christian became seriously ill and had to leave Excelerate – he is doing great today.

We got 17 smaller investors on board, who together invested DKK 534,000 in Excelerate.

The money was turned into hard work, and the entire year of 2021 was spent proving our first hypothesis: students would love the idea of a platform where they could find company collaborations for their thesis project. We felt convinced that the hypothesis was proven. This marks the Excelerate 2.0 period.

The first half of 2022 was tough, and we ran out of money and energy. We went from 5 people (most part-time) to 2, and I decided that I needed to find new co-founders. At the same time, we continued working with an external development partner. The main hypothesis here was to prove that we could bring companies on board.

Six months of searching and many conversations ended when I found both Nicolas Holstein Trebbien (COO) and Alexander Christrup (CMO)! We reached 1,000 students on the platform.

We won our first startup competition Co-Conf. The best solution for bridging educational institutions and the business world.

Mikkel Westermann (CTO) joins as a co-founder, and we decide to bring development in-house and start rebuilding the platform from scratch, as we are now much clearer on what it needs to do and where we want to go in the future.

We are launching the new version of the platform with a new look and a lot of new functionality, where everything has been rethought. We are expanding to also handle student jobs, internships, and full-time jobs. Thesis collaboration is still our primary product.