Kimeshan Naidoo grew up in a small sugar can farming town, on the east coast of South Africa. At 12 years old, he found an old python book, installed Python… and started to teach himself how to code. Five years ago, he moved to London to study for his masters in Computer Science at UCL. He is a triathlete, completing his first triathlon last year – and is planning to complete an olympic triathlon and eventually, an iron man race.

He and his co-founder both moved from different countries to London, but didn’t really know what to expect. They met up for a coffee to discuss an idea, which immediately spoke to Kimeshan – as he lived out the problem they were trying to solve when he moved to London. They decided to move forward and build a platform that embeds chat capabilities for high school or prospective university students to chat with current students at a particular school. In fact, Naidoo built the first version as his dissertation project. This is the creation story of Unibuddy.