Eight ventures, different routes to opportunity
Updated: Sep 2
Meet the Challenge Prize cohort and the different barriers they are setting out to address
2 September 2026, London, UK
Image: Cohort Announcement event, 26 August 2026
Social mobility is often discussed as if there were a single barrier between a young person and opportunity. In reality, opportunity can narrow at many different points. A young person might struggle to stay connected to education. They might not know which careers are available to them, or have access to someone who can help them navigate their options. They may have fewer opportunities to gain experience, build professional relationships or develop financial confidence. Or they may simply have had fewer chances to explore what they are interested in and where those interests could take them.
The opportunity gap is not one gap. That is one of the things we can see in the eight ventures selected for the first AI and Social Mobility Challenge Prize.
Delivered by EY Foundation and Social Tech Trust, in partnership with the Social Mobility Commission, and supported by Microsoft, HSF Kramer, EY, Fieldfisher and LinkedIn, the Challenge Prize brings together eight early-stage ventures exploring how AI and emerging technologies could widen access to education, skills, employment and opportunity for young people from lower socio-economic backgrounds.
In the first article in our AI and Social Mobility Insights series, we looked across the wider application landscape and identified five patterns: the growth of career and opportunity navigation tools; AI literacy becoming part of the social mobility question; lived experience influencing what gets built; the importance of designing with young people; and the need to turn ambition into evidence.
The selected cohort gives us an opportunity to look at those questions more closely. Rather than eight versions of the same idea, the ventures are working at different points in a young person’s journey. Together, they raise a broader question: Where does access to opportunity become unequal, and where might technology genuinely help?
Different points in a young person’s journey
The eight ventures span career navigation, digital skills, personalised education, youth support, STEM learning, financial capability, professional networks and entrepreneurship.
AVA is developing an AI-powered platform to help young people identify and navigate pathways into meaningful employment.
Breakthrough supports young people facing barriers to participation in the digital economy, combining applied AI and digital skills with coaching and connections to employers.
FIIT Learning is developing personalised AI-powered learning and support for young people who cannot consistently access education in the usual way.
HopeHub extends youth support into a digital environment through Jords, an AI goal coach that helps young people work towards goals, sustain motivation, and access relevant opportunities.
Louno Space combines hands-on space and STEM learning with Nova, an AI companion offering personalised missions for children aged 7–11.
MyPocketSkill connects young people with paid earning opportunities while embedding skills development and financial education into the experience.
Tangent is building an AI-native talent network designed to make professional connections and career opportunities more accessible.
And Ultra Education is developing Abby, an AI-powered entrepreneurship mentor who provides personalised guidance to help young people explore ideas, build confidence, and take practical next steps towards education, employment, or enterprise.
Taken individually, these are quite different propositions. Taken together, they show how many different things can shape someone’s access to opportunity.
Opportunity is shaped by more than qualifications
Education and skills clearly matter to social mobility. But the cohort points to a wider set of factors too. Knowing what opportunities exist matters. Having someone who can help you make sense of them matters. Networks matter. Experience matters. Financial confidence matters. So do encouragement, motivation and the ability to imagine yourself in a particular role or industry. These things are rarely distributed evenly. A young person might have the qualifications for an opportunity but never hear about it. They might know about it but not understand how to navigate the application process. They might have an idea but no one around them who knows how to help them take the first step.
This was one of the clearest themes in our first Insights article: access to opportunity is not simply about whether an opportunity exists. It is also about whether someone has the knowledge, guidance and connections to find and navigate it. The cohort lets us see what that can mean in practice.
Learning and skills: widening what young people can access
Several ventures begin with learning, but from very different starting points. FIIT Learning is focused on young people for whom regular access to school is difficult, and on whether more flexible and personalised learning can help maintain a connection to education. Louno Space starts earlier, using space and engineering to build curiosity and engagement with STEM. Its work also raises a wider question about who gets access to enrichment beyond the classroom. Breakthrough looks further along the journey, focusing on applied AI and digital skills as routes into participation in the digital economy.
There is a common thread here. As responsible AI and emerging technologies become more embedded in education and work, access to the skills needed to engage with them is also becoming part of the social mobility question. As we argued in Insights #1, AI literacy is not simply about knowing how to operate a tool. It also means being able to understand its limitations, question its outputs and use it with confidence and judgement. The question is therefore not only who can access technology, but who gets the chance to build the knowledge and confidence to use it well.
Guidance and navigation: making opportunity easier to understand
Other ventures focus on what happens between having an ambition and knowing what to do next. AVA is working on career navigation. Ultra Education’s Abby is similarly designed to provide personalised guidance around careers and entrepreneurship.
The need here is easy to underestimate. For someone with strong professional networks, access to advice can feel almost invisible. There may be a family member who understands a particular industry, a teacher who knows which route to recommend, or someone willing to look over an application. But not everyone has that. Apparently simple questions can become real barriers: What options are open to me? What skills do I need? How do I turn an interest into a career? What should I do next?
Technology could make some forms of personalised guidance available to more people, at times when a human adviser is not immediately available. But making advice available is only the beginning. The more important question is whether it helps a young person understand their options and take a meaningful next step.
Networks and connections: who you know still matters
Tangent focuses on another less visible source of inequality: professional networks. Connections can influence where people hear about opportunities, how well they understand a sector, who offers advice, and whether someone is willing to make an introduction. Those advantages can accumulate long before someone formally enters the labour market.
Technology cannot replace the trust and depth of human relationships, but it may change who gets the chance to form those relationships in the first place. That is a different proposition from replacing networks with technology. It is about making access to them less dependent on the circumstances into which someone was born.
Experience and financial capability: opportunities to participate
MyPocketSkill brings together another set of connected issues: earning, skills development and financial capability. Young people are often told they need experience before entering the labour market. But meaningful opportunities to gain that experience can themselves be difficult to access.
The same is true of financial capability. Learning about money matters, but there is a difference between receiving information and having the opportunity to earn, make decisions and build confidence through experience. MyPocketSkill’s model connects those things rather than treating them as separate stages. It is a useful reminder that widening opportunity is not only about giving people information - sometimes it is about giving them a chance to participate.
Confidence and the ability to act
Opportunity also has a less tangible dimension. Someone can technically have access to education, information or employment and still feel that none of it is really for them. Confidence, motivation and agency appear across several ventures in the cohort.
HopeHub’s Jords focuses on goals and motivation within a wider youth-support model. Ultra Education connects entrepreneurship guidance with confidence-building. Louno Space uses the excitement of space and engineering to encourage children to explore what they might be capable of. These can be harder outcomes to measure than the completion of a course or an application. But they still matter, because social mobility is partly about structures and resources. It is also about whether people can see themselves participating in opportunities and feel able to take the next step.
Image: Cohort Announcement event, 26 August 2026
What is AI adding?
Looking across the cohort also helps us separate two questions that can easily become blurred.
What problem is the venture trying to solve? And: What is AI actually adding?
AI should not be there simply because it makes a proposition sound more innovative. Across this cohort, its potential lies largely in personalisation, responsiveness, matching and scale. It could enable learning to adapt to an individual rather than offering everyone the same experience. It could make personalised guidance available outside a scheduled meeting. It could help surface opportunities relevant to someone’s goals, skills or circumstances. It could support someone through a journey rather than simply presenting a static bank of information. And it may make some forms of tailored support available to people who would otherwise struggle to access them.
AI also creates a higher bar. If a technology is intended to widen opportunity, it is not enough for it to work technically. We also need to understand who can use it, who benefits from it, and what changes as a result of its existence. That brings us back to another theme from Insights #1: ambition needs to be backed by evidence. A growing number of users is not necessarily the same as improved access to opportunity, and technical performance alone cannot tell us whether someone’s choices, confidence, skills or prospects have changed.
The Youth Voice Forum asks…
The EY Foundation’s Youth Voice Forum has been challenging us throughout the programme to consider these technologies from the perspective of the young people whose futures they may influence.
Three questions feel particularly relevant to this cohort:
Who might still struggle to access this solution?
Where does human support still matter?
What would make young people trust a technology like this?
They might sound like simple questions, but they take us beyond whether something is technically available. Cost, connectivity, disability, language, digital confidence, safeguarding, trust, and the circumstances in which someone uses a product can all affect whether it is genuinely accessible.
This connects directly to another of the patterns we identified earlier in the series: designing with young people matters. Young people should not only be asked whether they like a finished product. Their experiences should be able to shape what gets built and how. (See our earlier article, Don't Build AI Without Us: A Youth Manifesto for AI That Creates Opportunity.)
Responsible AI starts with practical questions
This is where responsible AI becomes less abstract. Who benefits, and who might still be excluded? Do people understand when AI is being used and what role it is playing? Can someone question an important recommendation or output? Who takes responsibility when something goes wrong?
And across this cohort, there is another question we will keep coming back to: Where does human support still matter? Many of the things these ventures are trying to widen — teaching, mentoring, careers advice, professional connections, youth support — are fundamentally relational. AI may help extend their reach, personalise parts of the experience or make support available at different moments.
That is not the same as assuming technology should replace the people involved.
Image: Cohort Announcement event, 26 August 2026
Eight routes to opportunity
The eight ventures do not offer a single theory of how technology improves social mobility. They are working at different points where opportunity can become unevenly distributed: learning, skills, guidance, networks, experience, financial capability, confidence and connection. Each is testing a different proposition about where technology might help. Some approaches may prove easier to scale than others. Some will depend more on schools, employers or other institutions adopting them. Some will rely more heavily on the human relationships surrounding the technology. And some assumptions will inevitably change as the ventures learn more from young people and the people who support them.
That is part of what the Challenge Prize is designed to explore. AI cannot solve social mobility, becuase the conditions shaping people’s opportunities extend far beyond technology. But these eight ventures give us eight places to ask a more useful question: Where can technology make a meaningful resource, connection or form of support more accessible — and what needs to be true for that access to translate into real opportunity?
Over the coming months, we will follow the cohort as they develop their approaches, test their assumptions and build the evidence behind their models. Meet the cohort and follow their journey through the AI and Social Mobility Challenge Prize.
Follow the AI and Social Mobility Insights series, as we explore the ventures, people and ideas shaping this emerging field.
