The Start-up Championing Mental Health for University Athletes

'The Alumni Files' focuses on all things entrepreneurial.

This week?Nick Greenhalgh, who was part of the MBA programme for 2019/21, tells the Entrepreneurship Centre about his start-up – Luca.

What is Luca?

Luca is a mental health monitoring and prevention solution for professional and elite university athletes. We exist because not enough is currently being done to monitor and support the mental health of athletes. Some teams employ psychologists but the power dynamics between club and athlete are such that many don’t feel comfortable opening up to employees and that’s where an independent and confidential third party like Luca comes in.

Tell us more about your business partner

Vas Nikolaou is my co-founder. We met on the Antler programme and got on super well from day one. It just so happens he’s technical, so we’re a good fit as he’s building the product and I take care of the business side of things. Luca’s also a good fit, not because Vas is tremendously sporty, despite his newfound fitness regime(!), but because he, unfortunately, suffered from an acute bout of depression in his early 20s. He’s incredibly passionate about building a solution that has the potential to improve the wellbeing of such a large number of people.

Vas is Greek, from Patras, and spends most of his time out there but spends a week in London with me most months. I’m heading to Greece on Sunday to work with him in person for 10 days - the perks of having a Greek co-founder!?

How did the idea of Luca come about?

Luca has been in my head for a couple of years, since starting the Oxford MBA programme in September 2019. I played blues rugby during the first term of my MBA and saw the pressure many guys were under; from their degrees but also the pressure they were putting on themselves to excel in their sport and be picked for the Varsity match against Cambridge.

OURFC is run by some brilliant people and it has a very positive culture but like many university sports teams, it’s resource-constrained, and it made me think there had to be a cost-effective way of supporting the mental health of the players. I was also aware of the problem in professional sport, having played for Northampton Saints for a couple of years, and I understood the difficulty for players to be open and honest with the people who pick them and whom they negotiate their contracts with. The mental health conversation in sports is progressing, but not quickly enough.?

This resulted in me and some friends developing the idea further during the Hilary term of 2020 in our MBA entrepreneurship project. Covid then hit and I deferred the second half of my studies by a year which meant Luca remained an academic project until March of this year when I took part in Antler’s three-month incubator programme. The incubator programme is a lot like the entrepreneurship project, except you ultimately pitch for investment from Antler, rather than pitching for a grade from professors.?

What stage is Luca currently at?

Having only been working on Luca since March, we’re still really early but have managed to raise some pre-seed funding from Antler and so we’re in a good spot to now take our solution to market. We’re currently working hard to onboard some professional and university teams as early adopters and having athletes using our product will help us refine it further and lead to a better product for the athletes, teams and coaches alike. We hope to be able to share some news on these pilots in the coming weeks.

How can I get involved?

One of the amazing things about entrepreneurship is that so many people are interested in what you’re doing and want to help, and we’re really fortunate to have experienced this so far with Luca - this is - possibly - because the problem we’re tackling resonates with so many. We’d love to hear from you if you’re interested in what we’re doing and are always happy to chat about Luca and our future plans. More concretely though, if you have contacts in any sports teams (universities or professional) that you think could benefit from and might be interested in a solution like ours, we’d love to hear from you. Also, if you know any psychologists or sports-focused psychiatrists, that would be super helpful too!

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