Urfuture

Background

The UK’s entry-level jobs market is broken. CVs don’t work for early-career talent. Job boards don’t reach Gen Z. And AI has made the problem worse — 45% of job seekers now use AI to write or edit their CVs, flooding employers with high volumes of low-quality, irrelevant applications.

The numbers tell the story. 957,000 young people aged 16 to 24 were not in education, employment or training in the final quarter of 2025. The infrastructure connecting education to employment hasn’t kept pace — and the consequences are being felt on both sides of the hiring equation.

The Opportunity

River Capital, investing via fund:AI — the North’s first dedicated AI fund — identified urfuture as a platform with the potential to fundamentally reshape how early-career hiring works.

Founded by Tom Keighley, Jayel Williams and Holly Hobbs, the Manchester-based company is building a new hiring infrastructure from first principles. Its platform combines a social-first Gen Z distribution engine with a proprietary behavioural science job matching algorithm — enabling employers to find higher-intent, more diverse candidates and make fairer hiring decisions, at scale.

Our diligence highlighted a significant and underserved market, a founding team with genuine depth, and early traction that validated the model. urfuture had already built one of the fastest-growing datasets in the country focused on entry-level hiring intelligence, with 2.4 million behavioural data points collected through its matching platform.

The Investment

River Capital led urfuture’s £1.7 million seed round (c.$2.3 million), alongside SyndicateRoom’s Access Fund, Manchester Angels, Fhunded, Solid Bond, Host Capital, and a number of sector specialist angels.