The inside knowledge shouldn't be a prerequisite.

In 2024, Annah was a first-year at the University of Warwick, hungry to gain experience. A Biochemistry student, she found herself interning at a Big 4 audit firm. The path did not feel natural, and it did not feel fair.

Arriving in Canary Wharf, she noticed the talent pool clustered around the same six Russell Group universities, and that 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. She 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.”

She 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, she says, she would not be where she is. That experience taught her that access to the right information and community changes outcomes more than almost anything else.

So she 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 she had personally fallen into and climbed out of.

The disconnect between her background and what she 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.