Become a founder before you graduate.
The six-month venture-building programme for exceptional students who want to build a real company while they’re still at university.
Cohort 1 applications are now open
Student venture studio
We provide the opportunity.
You build the company.
Sky High Ventures identifies exceptional students and gives them the opportunity, ideas, education and environment to build a company from the ground up. We identify commercial opportunities, form the founding teams and work alongside them through the first six months of building the business.
You don’t need to arrive with a startup idea. You can apply as an individual or with a team, although we actively encourage exceptional individuals to apply. During induction, we’ll bring the talented students together and form the teams around complementary skills, experience and potential.
We provide the opportunity, we provide you with structured learning and we support you. You build the company.
- 01
We find the opportunity
Commercial opportunities sourced from our own research, our network and corporate partners — selected for genuine scale potential.
- 02
We build the team
Selected students come together at induction, where we form founding teams around complementary skills and founder potential.
- 03
You build the company
Six months of structured education, strategic support and relentless pace — with the aim of a first customer inside the programme.
Why Sky High
Untapped founders are sitting in universities.
Most students spend university preparing for their careers. A small number decide they would rather start building one.
We believe there is a huge amount of untapped entrepreneurial talent sitting in universities. Many of the students who could become exceptional founders simply haven’t had the opportunity to try. They may have never considered starting a company, may not have a business idea and may not know who they would build it with.
That’s where Sky High comes in.
We identify opportunities that we believe have genuine commercial potential. These can come from our own research and network, or from problems and opportunities identified by businesses and corporate partners. We then give selected students the opportunity to turn those opportunities into companies.
You don’t need a startup idea. You need the ability and ambition to build one.
Think big from the beginning. Build a huge business together from the ground up.
Ambition
We're building companies, not student projects.
Sky High is deliberately different from a typical university entrepreneurship programme. We are not interested in creating businesses simply because they make good student projects or look impressive on a CV.
We provide business ideas with the potential to become £100m+ turnover companies, and we want founders who are capable of thinking at that level from the beginning.
That doesn’t mean we expect a student to know how to build a £100m company on day one. It means we expect them to have the ambition to try, the time and will to throw themselves completely into this, the curiosity to learn what it takes and the determination to keep going when the first version doesn’t work.
The bar
£100m+
Turnover potential we look for in every opportunity we develop.
20 hrs
Minimum weekly commitment, in addition to your university studies.
The six months
Six months to build a real business.
The programme is deliberately practical and deliberately fast.
You’ll learn about strategy, customers, business models, sales, marketing, finance, operations and growth, but you won’t be learning these things simply because they’re on a syllabus. You’ll learn them because you need them to build your company.
We want teams speaking to customers early, testing their assumptions and finding out what people will actually pay for. We don’t want six months spent writing business plans that sit in a drawer. Our aim is for every team to have its first customer within the six-month programme.
The first customer is an important milestone. It isn’t the destination. We’re starting small because that’s how significant companies are built.
Students don’t learn entrepreneurship in a classroom. They experience the reality of building a company.
Commitment
This is a serious commitment.
We expect founders to spend at least 20 hours a week working on their venture, in addition to their university studies.
You’ll still have lectures, assignments and exams. You’ll also have customers to speak to, products to build and a business to make work. It will be demanding, and that’s intentional.
Sky High is not designed for everyone. We are looking for people who are excited by the idea of taking on that challenge and who are prepared to work hard, learn quickly and take responsibility for the outcome.
If you want something to add to your CV, there are easier options. If you want to graduate having built a company, this is for you.
Next phase
What happens after six months?
The initial programme is only the beginning for the strongest teams.
Founders who successfully graduate from the programme may be invited into the next phase of their venture with Sky High. This is an invite-only opportunity for exceptional teams.
In that phase, we’ll work with selected founders on the things that become increasingly important as the company grows: developing the investment proposition, learning how to pitch, preparing for fundraising and getting in front of investors.
We don’t promise investment. What we do promise is that if your company has earned a place in the next phase, we’ll work hard to help you become ready for the opportunities ahead.
The aim is not to teach you how to pitch a company. It’s to help you build one worth investing in.
Our ambition
10 unicorns
in 10 years.
Sky High Ventures is being built as a serious venture studio, not simply as another student entrepreneurship programme. We want to identify opportunities and founders with the potential to build £100m+ turnover companies, and ultimately much larger businesses.
We know that achieving something on this scale requires more than finding a few good startup ideas. It requires identifying exceptional people early, giving them meaningful opportunities and creating an environment in which they can develop into outstanding founders.
We know how difficult that will be. That’s precisely why we’re starting with the people.
Find exceptional people. Give them exceptional opportunities. Help them build exceptional companies.