For many young people, the first step toward entrepreneurship begins with an idea. The challenge is knowing what to do with that idea next.

StartaSprout is building a platform designed to help student founders move from having an idea to understanding the problem, testing their assumptions and taking practical steps toward building a venture.

Founded by Oluseun Adesanya, an AI Product Manager at Qualtrics, StartaSprout focuses on student entrepreneurs and aspiring founders, with the goal of making entrepreneurship education more practical, accessible and useful for young people who want to build startups while developing their skills and experience. The organisation describes its mission simply: to empower the next generation of student founders to build the future now.

Building Beyond the Traditional Startup Classroom

StartaSprout is focused on widening access to entrepreneurship education, particularly for student innovators from different backgrounds and schools, including those who may not traditionally receive attention from venture capital networks.

Its approach goes beyond encouraging students to start businesses. The organisation aims to help young founders identify meaningful problems, understand the people they are solving them for, test their assumptions and develop ventures capable of addressing real challenges.

That philosophy is reflected in the organisation’s Venture Lab Sprint, a practical programme designed to help student founders turn raw ideas into real, testable ventures.

It is structured around two 90-minute sessions. Instead of spending weeks developing a business plan before engaging with potential customers, participants were introduced to the foundations of startup building through practical exercises and guided discussions. The sessions encouraged participants to examine the problems they wanted to solve, identify their potential customers and consider how they could begin testing whether their ideas had real potential. The underlying principle is straightforward: an idea becomes more valuable when it can be tested against reality.

Giving Young Founders the Tools to Build

The Venture Lab Sprint forms part of a broader collection of learning resources StartaSprout has developed for aspiring founders.

Its free micro-courses include From Problem to Clear Idea and Your First MVP & Customer Experiments, giving learners structured ways to work through some of the earliest stages of building a startup. The platform also provides a resource library and practical content covering ideation, launching, scaling, startup tools and terminology.

Its articles address questions that young founders encounter as they begin building, including customer validation, MVP development, product-market fit and the experience of launching while still in school.

Bringing AI Into Entrepreneurship Education

StartaSprout is also using AI to make startup guidance more accessible through its AI-powered Startup Coach. The tool is designed to support aspiring founders as they work through the early stages of building a company, providing a practical starting point for thinking through ideas and startup questions.

It sits alongside StartaSprout’s courses, articles, opportunities and founder-focused programming, extending the organisation’s support beyond scheduled sessions helping them make decisions, test ideas and take the next step.

The Leadership Behind StartaSprout

At the centre of StartaSprout is its founder, Oluseun Adesanya, whose professional work brings together artificial intelligence, product development and entrepreneurship education.

Adesanya is an AI Product Manager at Qualtrics, where her work sits at the intersection of intelligent automation, enterprise innovation and user-centred product development. Her work focuses on building products that connect human insight with technology and help organisations turn complex challenges into actionable solutions. Her interest in entrepreneurship education predates her work in AI product management.

Oluseun has worked across entrepreneurship education, curriculum design and founder development, designing programmes and learning experiences for universities, foundations and entrepreneurship organisations. Her professional background includes entrepreneurship curriculum development for the University of the People, startup education at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and entrepreneurship programme work with FATE Foundation.

Her professional profile states that her curriculum work has reached more than 10,000 learners across Africa and the United States. She has also worked as a startup judge and advisor, evaluating student ventures and supporting early-stage founders.

That combination of product experience and entrepreneurship education informs the way StartaSprout approaches founder development. The organisation brings startup theory closer to the realities of building, testing and improving a product.

For Oluseun, the goal is not simply to introduce more young people to entrepreneurship. It is to give them the practical foundation to participate in it. Through the Venture Lab Sprint, free micro-courses, resource library, AI-powered Startup Coach and ongoing educational content, StartaSprout is creating accessible pathways for students to begin learning and building early. Its work is built around a simple proposition: young people should not have to wait until they have funding, access to a major accelerator or years of experience before they can start testing an idea. StartaSprout is helping them begin with what they have, learn through the process and build from there.