Martin Buhr, Tyk
Martin Buhr, CEO and Founder, Tyk

Member Article

Tyk Announces Winners of Side Project Fund to Support Budding Side Hustles

Tyk, the API and service management platform, has announced the winners of its Side Project Fund initiative which will provide nine entrepreneurs grants for exciting side projects. With advances in technology and the growing flexibility around business working hours, having a secondary business or side hustle is becoming more common, with an estimated 40% of Brits and 45% of Americans believed to be running their own side projects.

Tyk’s history is rooted in starting as a side project out of necessity. Martin Buhr, CEO and Founder of Tyk needed a simple, flexible and low-cost solution for API management. After struggling to find a technology solution that was fit-for-purpose for his work, Martin set about creating his own platform. And so Tyk was born. Tyk’s Open Source API Gateway, and subsequent Management Platform, is now being used by thousands of companies, non-profits and hobbyists across the globe.

The company created the Side Project Fund to provide support to other entrepreneurs for their own exciting side projects, who may be struggling to get started or can’t afford a necessary element for it to work. After receiving over 200 high quality applications, Tyk has chosen nine lucky winners and provided funding for projects such as telehealth, anti-misinformation tools and learning platforms.

The winners include:

  • Kacper Niburski, ddxed.com: a tool for physicians and medical learners to understand the best test, diagnostics, and next steps in complex medical cases
  • Olivia Festy, iCreate: an augmented reality (AR) experience for use by the general public and local businesses in North London, offering free digital skills training to young people aged 16-24
  • Derek Ekins, Plurality.app: an anti-misinformation tool which, when someone shares a mainstream media article and you click on it, Plurality.app kicks in and shows you one or more articles on the same subject from independent sources
  • Sam Chorlton, BugSeq: a platform to analyse clinical microbiology nanopore sequencing data
  • Paul Kuravilla, Codecrafters.io: a programming learning platform which helps users learn about everyday programming tools by building them from scratch
  • Liyas Thomas, Postwoman.io: a free, fast and beautiful API request builder which is a web alternative to Postman
  • Pablo Jimenez Mateo, Good Habit Device: a virtual pet whose emotions feed on the steps you take, the amount of water that you drink, even how regularly you brush your teeth
  • Segii Zaisev, On the same page: a minimalist collaborative whiteboard with simplicity and honesty at its heart
  • Jessica Russell, Disability Civility: a training package designed to improve the daily interactions between disabled and able-bodied folk

As well as providing grants to each of the winners, the Tyk team will also be providing mentorship and guidance to help them achieve their goals.

Martin Buhr, CEO and Founder at Tyk said: “Tyk started out as a side hustle that I was working on while I was in another role. That original spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship has become a cornerstone of our company culture and we actively encourage all our employees to develop their own side projects. As we’ve grown, we’re happy to be able to offer support to the wider entrepreneur community through Tyk’s Side Project Fund. This year’s winners have created some great projects and we look forward to seeing how they develop further.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tyk .

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