Two students at Cambridge Judge who co-founded the collaborative blogging platform Niume reached their initial funding target of £100,000 in just six days, and have now raised £170,000 through a crowdfunding venture launched by two Cambridge Judge alumni.
(Image removed)Francesco Facca
Daniel Gennaoui from Spain and Francesco Facca of Italy were the first co-founder team to study on the Postgraduate Diploma in Entrepreneurship (PGDE) programme at Cambridge Judge. They enrolled last September, and Niume then applied and was accepted into the Accelerate Cambridge programme at Cambridge Judge. The fundraising went through crowdsourcing platform SyndicateRoom, co-founded by two Cambridge Judge MBAs.
Launched in July 2014, Niume is a collaborative blogging platform in which content creators post in collaborative blogs called “Spheres” that already have large audiences, particularly in the art, travel and photography areas. The platform now has 500,000 monthly users, a figure growing by 20 per cent a month, and has a target of one million monthly users by the end of 2015.
Pronounced “nee-u-me,” the name Niume is a wordplay on the expression “new me.”
(Image removed)Daniel Gennaoui
“We realised that the PGDE and Accelerate Cambridge programmes complemented each other, offering very useful and different things that Niume could benefit from,” says Daniel. PGDE helped to “improve ourselves as entrepreneurs” and Accelerate Cambridge coaching “pushed us to question our business model from every angle, ultimately helping us improve it.”
Niume has a target market of 30 to 40 year olds with university degrees, and so far has the largest audiences in the UK, US, South Africa and Australia, with women comprising 60 per cent of users. The company works directly with companies to create content that is shared on Niume and social media, which appears in a different colour from other Niume content in order to identify it as commercial content.
Daniel says:
"People are put off by traditional advertising, so Niume allows companies to post commercial content of a high quality that is different from advertising."
Cambridge-based crowdfunding platform SyndicateRoom was co-founded by Gonçalo de Vasconcelos (Cambridge MBA 2012) and Tom Britton (Cambridge MBA 2012).