A team of Imperial students are hoping to make avoidable blindness a thing of the past with a revolutionary imaging tool.
Meet the team
Nadal Sarkytbayev, CEO (MSc Theoretical Physics 2016)
Will Billingsley, CFO (BSc Biology 2017)
Isa Ibrahim, CTO (BSc Material Science and Engineering 2017)
Get in touch
Instagram: @aptapuk
Facebook: /ApTapUK
LinkedIn: /ApTap-ltd
Twitter: @ApTapUK
The problem
Our mission is to bring simplicity and control to managing bills and subscriptions with just a tap and we want to build the world’s first Appstore for Subscriptions or an iTunes for Services. We believe this is something that could make a huge impact not only in the UK market, but also across the world.
The solution
ApTap is a software plugin, which is easy to integrate into any FinTech, bank or challenger to increase user engagement and add new revenue streams. We allow end users to organize their recurring payments and do an automatic comparison of their bills to deals on the market; the user is then able to cancel, switch or sign up to services within the app with just a few taps!
The company
The team met on the football field playing for the 1st and 2nd team of Imperial and have been friends ever since. The idea originated at a ‘Founders of the Future’ event with Santander, at which we were given a new perspective of PSD2 and Open Banking. We brainstormed the idea that evening and 16 hours later we wrote our first business plan and proposed it to Imperial.
All three co-founders are Imperial College London Science graduates who have been working full time at ApTap for the past 2.5 years. Our team is diverse in background and education, which gives us hugely different perspectives, but also channels into different opportunities.
Successes
Two Angel investors have committed to fund our Seed investment to this round. We have spoken to five banks and six FinTech/challengers about ApTap and we have given five live demos of the product. We are finalising our first proof-of-concept contracts with two of the challenger banks to integrate in August. We have three contacts ready to sign with the largest comparison engines in UK. We are progressing really fast and feel we have now caught the right wave to fulfil our ambitions.
Advisors
We have two advisors onboard from the financial world, James Dickerson (MD Accenture) and Elliot Limb (CEO of CoBa) with combined 20+ years of banking and FinTech experience and Head Developer with 12+ years of software development experience.
Advice to aspiring entrepreneurs
Our advice to any students thinking of starting a business would be to use the opportunity of being at Imperial to do more than just getting good grades. Be innovative in the approach, explore many different ideas and experiment with people from different backgrounds.
