Connecting King's students with some of London's most exciting entrepreneurs

Venture Crawl is the King's Entrepreneurship Institute 's popular annual event that invites King’s students on an exploration of London’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Set up by the Entrepreneurship Institute in 2017 with one bus, London Venture Crawl has since grown to an annual event involving 13+ universities, 10 buses and 300+ students, with parallel events taking place in Birmingham, Manchester, Chicago and Melbourne.

Venture Crawl 2023

This March, more than 30 King’s students from a variety of subject areas and year groups hopped on the Venture Crawl bus to experience entrepreneurship first-hand by connecting to real-world businesses. They heard from founders and CEOs and developing their entrepreneurial skills, as well as networking between stops, by chatting with peers and sharing thoughts and ideas.

This year’s packed agenda featured stops at:

• Grind | Certified B Corp Roastery?to hear from David Abrahamovitch , founder and CEO of Grind, followed by a tour of the Roastery to learn all about Grind’s business model, brand and future goals for their home-compostable coffee pods.
• The Crisis Venture Studio?to see how entrepreneurship can be a force for good by investing in ideas that aim to end homelessness or prevent it from happening in the first place.?
• Mercato Metropolitano to learn how Mercato supports start-ups to scale through their key values of sustainability and community.
• German Kraft Brewing to hear from co-founder Michele Tieghi , King’s Alumnus (Business Management 2017) who shared his own start-up journey. Founded six years ago, the German Kraft Brewery now brings fresh, authentic German-style beers to five different sites in London.?
• Science Gallery London to learn how science and art come together to explore disruptive thinking and debate some of society’s big questions, including AI, ethics and more.

The range of experiences we had throughout the day were diverse, unconventional and beyond anything we could have possibly imagined. Every entrepreneur had a different story, a different idea and a very different approach to their venture. Hearing their stories, successes and failures was an absolutely incredible experience." – Pahal Patnaik, BSc Economics and Management, King’s Business School.

It was great to be encouraged to network and talk to as many people participating in the event as possible. I also really liked how we managed to get some 1:1 time with some of the CEOs and have our questions answered. The whole day inspired me to work further on my own idea.” – Viktoria Petrova, German and Management, Faculty of Arts & Humanities.

Over 200 students took part in crawls across London through a collaboration with Brunel, SOAS, Greenwich, London School of Economics, Loughborough London University, Queen Mary, London College of Fashion, London Metropolitan University, University of East London, Imperial College London, Goldsmiths and University of Westminster. Crawls also took place in Wolverhampton and Surrey and in cities around the world, including Chicago and Sydney.

The day finished with an online Pitch Off event where 10 London-based universities battled it out to be crowned this year's London Venture Crawl Pitch Off Champion. Last year's winner, Mercy Ofuya, PhD Alumna (PhD Medical Statistics) and founder of Mami, kicked off the event by delivering her winning 90-second pitch and sharing the progress of her idea to date.?