Landit takes aim at relocation hurdles

A technology start-up founded by three Durham students is preparing to launch a platform designed to help people settling in a new country discover the support, benefits and opportunities available to them.

Landit is the brainchild of Durham University Business School master’s student Kushalini Paul and fellow students Seva Kolesnik and Arman Bayatmaku, who met after experiencing many of the same difficulties when moving to the UK.

The platform aims to simplify the often fragmented process of finding information about everything from discounts and financial support to bursaries and other schemes, while taking into account factors such as an individual’s visa conditions.

For Kushalini, who moved to Durham from India to study a master’s in management, the idea was shaped by her own experience of arriving in an unfamiliar country.

She said: “Nobody hands you the rulebook when you move to a new country.

“Support schemes exist. Perks exist. Hardship funds, visa-specific entitlements, university bursaries, they're real, and often more generous than people expect.

“But they’re scattered across a dozen government pages, written in language that assumes you already know what you’re looking for, hedged with eligibility rules that shift depending on your visa.

“So, people don’t apply.

“Not because they aren't capable or ambitious, but because nobody could reasonably be expected to find out the thing existed in the first place.

“That’s not a failure of effort. It’s a failure of discovery.”

She added: “There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from arriving somewhere new and realising the map you were given doesn’t match the territory.

“I felt it the first time I arrived in Durham from India, utterly clueless about the basic, everyday discounts and support I could have been using from day one. 

“It wasn’t that none of it existed. 

“It was that there was no single place to go and simply be told what I was entitled to and how to actually claim it. 

“Instead, I was piecing my future together from Reddit threads and Facebook community groups; taking my chances on advice from strangers, because that was genuinely the best information available.”

Kushalini initially planned to return to India after completing her studies, but became increasingly involved in Durham’s entrepreneurial community.

She became student co-chair of her programme and worked with Entrepreneurs Durham to develop the university’s student founder ecosystem.

Through that experience, she discovered the problems she had faced were shared by other international students.

Kushalini added: “I kept meeting other international students hitting the exact same wall: not knowing where to start, not knowing who to ask.”

The origins of Landit can be traced to a Global Hackathon at Entrepreneurs First’s London office, where Kushalini teamed up with Seva, who moved from Russia to study a master’s in anthropology, and Arman, from Turkey, who was studying a master’s in computer science.

The trio developed a prototype called Cache Me If You Can, designed to make discovering available support more intuitive and engaging.

It finished third among more than 30 teams at the five-hour event, but rather than leaving the concept at the hackathon table, the founders decided to develop it into Landit.

The platform asks users about their circumstances before identifying support, perks and opportunities relevant to them.

Visa conditions are considered from the outset, meaning users should only be shown schemes they are legally eligible to access, before being directed towards official routes for applying or claiming.

Landit will also incorporate a community element where users can share their experiences of settling into a new country and navigating the systems around them.

Kushalini added: “We do not help anyone get into a country.

“We help people settle once they’re here and that can be as small as a discount you didn’t know you are entitled to at your local Tesco, or as significant as perks you’d never have found on your own.”

The founders have also made data privacy a central part of the platform, with users able to delete information and documents rather than having them retained indefinitely.

Landit is preparing to go live this month, timed to coincide with the arrival of a new intake of international students in the UK.

However, its founders see the student market as only the starting point.

They believe the same challenges affect people relocating for work, families moving internationally, founders searching for regional support and even long-term residents trying to keep track of changing schemes.

And while the business has been built in Durham, its longer-term ambitions stretch well beyond the UK.

Kushalini added: “This isn’t just a UK problem.

“It’s the same for a British graduate in Berlin, a nurse relocating to Canada, a family resettling after years of waiting.

“What we do know is the problem is real because we’ve lived it, and because everyone we’ve described it to recognises the same issues.”

For Kushalini, the opportunity ultimately comes back to making information that already exists easier for people to find and use.

She added: “The opportunity was never the problem.

“Knowing it was there; that was the problem.

“And this isn’t only for students.

“It’s for anyone who has ever travelled somewhere on the strength of a dream and needed a hand finding their footing once they arrived.

“You bring the dream. We’ll help you land it.”

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