The inside knowledge shouldn't be a prerequisite.

In 2024, Annah and Sem were both first-years at the University of Warwick, hungry to gain experience. Annah, a Biochemistry student, found herself interning at a Big 4 audit firm. Sem, a physicist, ended up in investment banking. Neither path felt natural, and neither felt fair.

Arriving in Canary Wharf, they noticed the same thing independently: the talent pool clustered around the same six Russell Group universities, and most students seemed to have had earlier exposure, a clearer understanding of how to navigate a system that was never explained to anyone from outside it. They found opportunities the same way everyone did: Google searches, word of mouth, and sprawling Excel spreadsheets.

“It often felt like we were trying to understand a system that everyone else had somehow already been taught.”

Both had been shaped by Prosper Warwick, a society offering mentorship and skills workshops for Black students navigating spaces where they were not traditionally represented. Without it, they say, they would not be where they are. That experience taught them that access to the right information and community changes outcomes more than almost anything else.

So they combined the three tools students were already cobbling together: deadline tracking, personalised opportunity discovery, and a progress tracker, into one platform. Vitae was born not from a gap in the market, but from a gap they had personally fallen into and climbed out of.

The disconnect between their backgrounds and what they observed in the early-careers space felt fundamentally unfair. Vitae exists to close it: centralising opportunities, removing the opacity, and making the structured knowledge that gives some students an unfair head start available to everyone.