When one idea became two
The KTH student Manne Larsson approached KTH Innovation together with Robin Lundberg for support in taking the first steps towards starting a company.
They had been working on an idea they called Campus Competence, that could be compared to a digital advertising board for jobs on campus. The idea really took off and at the same Manne Larsson was in the process of getting into the property market and bying a flat. This lead to the next idea, BoRank, a website that investigates and provides status information on housing cooperatives (bostadsrättsföreningar).
- I was going to buy a flat and was complaining to Robin (Lundberg) about how hard and complicated it was to analyse the housing cooperatives' annual reports, says Manne Larsson.
The services that he himself was looking for did not exist on the market and that led to the KTH students building it themselves. Together with the third team member Johan Lorenzen they founded the site borank.se where the housing cooperatives' financial situations are rated in a structured way for potential buyers, using an algorithm that has been developed together with a professor at KTH.
Crucial support
The team, which has been supported by KTH Innovation and is a member of Student Inc., points out that the support has had a great impact on the success.
– Our business coach Donnie Lygonis has been a deciding factor for getting anywhere at all. The fact that we got to share an office space with other startups at an early stage of development has also been incredibly good for us. We have learnt an extreme amount every week and there is broad competence in the other startups, says Manne Larsson.
Find out more about BoRank and check out the financial status of your own building cooperative.
Have you got and idea that you would like to develop, or are you curious about innovations from KTH? Contact innovation@kth.se!