Jazz has a somewhat hypnotic quality. Sat in the audience at a jazz bar, it is all too easy to get sucked into the rhythm, to notice your heart rate quickening and to find yourself passing an hour without feeling any time elapse. It’s a very similar feeling to getting in the groove working on a passion project or a new venture late into the night. 

Building something, especially as a student, can be an extremely overwhelming experience. Like in jazz, you are forced to improvise, to find solutions and to learn to pull on the different strengths of members. In both cases it is scary, requiring deep trust and collaboration to function effectively. 

That unique blend of uncertainty and trust is exactly the way in which jazz holds a significance in my life. I didn’t get into live music until I started traveling alone. I find exploring cities solo really thrilling during the day and can quite happily spend hours pottering around museums, parks and cafes. It’s when the evening draws in that the awareness of being solo, surrounded with groups, really kicks in. 

I found myself slipping into jazz bars most nights on my first solo trip to Amsterdam, as a way to surround myself with people and to be immersed in art. It has developed symbolically into a representation of independence and exploration, and a way to root in circumstances of uncertainty.

The theme of navigating unknown situations runs through this edition, as our writers draw a focus to the parallels, overlap and learning opportunities between music and business. 

From Hummr, combining both in a technological platform to bring hummed ideas for tunes into editable tracks, to the intersection of marketing, community, and social impact in Tea Time Tips mirroring the necessity of instrumental range, to Cicely’s reflections on improvising and following a rhythm that isn’t your own in the process of building collaboratively. We are also excited to be featuring our first band, Sayde, who explore the process of developing music and performing live, and the vulnerability that comes along with it.

We hope that you enjoy this edition, and hopefully some of the takeaways will inspire you to lean into collaboration and ‘get in the groove’ with the projects you’re passionate about this November.

— Lauren Manby (Editor in Chief)

📍London School of Economics (LSE)

We’re Dev Vohra and Sam Mendonca, the founders of Hummr, an AI-native music studio. Dev, CEO, studies Philosophy and Economics at LSE. Sam, COO, studies Business at UCL. Together we’re building a studio where you hum a melody and turn it into a real, editable track.

Hummr started with a problem we kept running into. Dev is a Grade 8 guitarist and singer who DJs and was raised on his dad’s 1970s records, yet production was the one part of music he could never break into. Plenty of people have melodies in them, but very few can get them out. The market is polarised: professional DAWs like Ableton and FL Studio offer total control but assume years of expertise, while AI generators like Suno hand you a finished song you can barely shape. There’s nothing in between for people who want to make the music themselves.

So we built the tool we wanted to exist. You hum into your phone or laptop and Hummr transcribes it into MIDI, snaps it to a key and scale, and lets you swap instruments, layer tracks and edit notes in a piano roll. We keep your raw take separate from the corrections, so you can re-key or re-humanise a part without re-recording it. On top of that sits an AI co-producer that works inside your session. It can suggest a bassline, adjust a fader or write automation, and you decide what to keep, preview or bin. It’s a collaborator in the room, not a black box.

Jazz is the best description we’ve found for building a startup. A jazz musician doesn’t wait for the perfect chart. They play what’s in front of them and respond to what comes back. That’s how the two of us work: one of us takes a solo, the other picks up the phrase and pushes it somewhere new. Dev leads on product and the music, Sam keeps the band tight and in time, and the best moves come from the space between us. A hum is an improvisation: unpolished, half-formed, honest. Hummr’s job is to be the bandmate who hears that idea and plays something back, so making music starts as a conversation instead of a settings screen.

We’re heading for public launch in the coming weeks, with a growing waitlist. Longer term, we want Hummr to meet producers wherever they work, starting with beginners and hobbyists and growing into professional studios.

If you’ve ever hummed something in the shower and wished you could keep it, we built Hummr for you. Join the waitlist, follow along, and come jam with us.

— Dev Vohra & Sam Mendonca

📍University College London (UCL)

Hello, I'm Khadijah. I'm 20, and I founded Cicely, a UK-based accessibility and participation startup for the built environment.

I think people sometimes expect founders to have had some great moment of revelation when starting their companies, a eureka moment, if you will, but mine was somewhat more spontaneous. 

One thing pushed me into another, the next opportunity opened ahead, and before I knew it, I was building a technology company. I never thought I'd say that. I'd always considered myself entrepreneurial, but surprised myself by going into technology. 

One of the key moments was UCL's SEND Tech Innovation Challenge. I was randomly allocated to a team, and for two frantic weeks we worked on Coda, an idea exploring the environmental and cognitive challenges d/deaf students face. We built a prototype, spoke to deaf and hard of hearing students, and placed second. 

It was stressful, but extraordinarily fun, and I think I spent the rest of the year chasing that feeling. I kept building while job-hunting, not entirely sure where things would lead. With encouragement and support from people at UCL, I eventually applied for funding. We secured backing from Bethnal Green Ventures, Europe's leading 'tech for good' accelerator, which is still surreal to say. I'm enormously grateful to everyone who helped us get there. 

This developed into the Cicely that exists today, a startup that has changed significantly since those roots. At one point, we were building a crowdsourced review platform for university spaces. Now, we're developing ways for people to give immediate, accessible feedback about the places and services they use, tied to where and when an experience happens and, where useful, the conditions surrounding it. 

I've come to think that jazz is an art of listening. A musician offers a phrase or a chord, and someone else catches it, bends it, and turns it into something neither expected, but which somehow works beautifully. 

I think that's a wonderful metaphor for being willing to let another person's voice, tone, and interpretation change the music. You have to improvise, and sometimes follow a rhythm that isn't yours.

That's what co-founding asks of us. Our work is fundamentally about listening to people's experiences of physical spaces, but even the act of giving feedback can be inaccessible. We can't expect everyone to communicate in exactly the same way. Sometimes we have to change how we ask, listen again, and be willing to make something different from what we originally imagined. 

I suppose that's what building Cicely has taught me. Listening isn't simply about hearing what people have to say. It's about allowing what they say to change what you do. And if we're serious about building better places for everyone, I think that's a rhythm worth learning.

— Khadijah Ajala

Jazz relies heavily on collaborative improvisation, where musicians continuously build upon, echo, and reshape one another's ideas in real time.

The output is something no individual could have created alone and that’s how I see myself building a career in the intersection of marketing, community, and social impact in London: following my curiosity, bringing people together and allowing serendipity to shape what comes next.

I'm Anna Nguyen, a startup growth marketer, community builder, World Economic Forum Global Shaper of London Hub I, and one of the Top 26 Marketers to Follow in 2026 by Girls in Marketing. In 2024, I launched Tea Time Tips, a career hub for aspiring and early-career marketers in the UK, to share the practical advice, career events and resources I wish I’d had when starting out.

When I started my career, I realised that learning marketing and navigating the industry were two different challenges. Beyond courses and qualifications, there was knowledge and insights you could only gain from people who had already been there e.g. how to get your first experience, which skills to develop and where to find opportunities. I wanted to make those conversations and resources more accessible to people who might not have an established professional network.

Tea Time Tips has since grown into more than 550 followers across platforms, with opportunities for aspiring marketers to learn through content, podcast conversations and community initiatives. I’ve featured about 20 industry leaders from leading organisations including TikTok, Google and the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School. The initiative has evolved into a collaborative space where people can exchange experiences, build relationships and help one another find their next step.

I also bring the same curiosity to my work in growth at Lumi, an early-stage London startup helping people connect everyday feelings with physical sensations to better understand factors that may affect their mental health. Working in a startup environment means learning from users, testing assumptions and adapting how we communicate a product as we discover what resonates.

Just as jazz depends on musicians building on one another's ideas, I believe collaboration is fundamental to building something meaningful. Beyond an audience to grow or a channel to reach more people, community is a source of perspectives, relationships and possibilities that one person couldn't create alone.

- Anna Nguyen

📍King’s College London (KCL)

Sayde is the project born from a small group of London-based musicians Aidan Chan, Matthew Jodhan, Priyasha Sen, Sophia Snow, and myself, performing a mix of jazz, pop and alternative genres live in intimate venues. Drawing inspiration from artists ranging from contemporary to classic, the unique sonic signature of Sayde can only be attributed to the sum of its eclectic parts. 

To be part of a collective with shared interests is a dream for many, so it was a no-brainer when Priyasha Sen suggested the idea for Sayde just over a year ago. Each of us may have joined the group with different levels of experience and knowledge of what it actually means to be in a band, but we all had the same excitement for what was to come for us musically. 

We played our first live show at K.C. Continental Stores only six months into slightly sporadic meetings and rehearsals. The nerves that day were unspoken but palpable in the sweltering room filled with our dearest friends, all crouched around our make-shift stage. 

It wasn’t anyone’s first time performing in front of other people, but everyone- excluding Matthew as he has specifically told me he’s never nervous- felt that vulnerability that comes with unveiling something precious that has only been known to you for so long. I can only describe the feeling of playing original songs as voluntarily reading out your journal when literally no one asked. 

We still managed to capture moments of magic through the nerves, with many friends raving about Sophia’s original song “Lookalike”, a composition she initially wrote for a pastiche assignment during her time at the University of York, and Priyasha’s powerful vocal cover of Aretha Franklin’s “Natural Woman”, both of which now staple encore pieces of the band. But something about our K.C. Continental debut felt

like foreign territory, we left the experience proud of ourselves but equally eager to go again.

At our more recent performance at Café Hebe, we delivered one of our most cohesive performances as a band. Despite having fewer rehearsals under our belts, there was definitely a sense of calm in the air. We had done this before. We silently harboured the kind of trust in both your own instincts and those of the collective which you can only have the second time round. 

As someone who started off as a bedroom guitarist who couldn’t even comprehend playing in front of their bandmates during the very first rehearsal, it was such a milestone to feel relaxed playing in front of an audience. 

We exist in a time where it’s so easy to keep up with any number of people who are probably much better than you at whatever it is you want to do. You’ll never see the errors, the hours and all the mental blocks that were tackled along the way that ultimately led to the success which seems effortless to them and

unfamiliar to you. But if you care enough, you just start, you do it scared and then one day, you won’t be. 

I can only speak for myself when I say being a part of Sayde has been a truly rewarding experience, which I hope will continue in whatever form it may take for a long time to come. Keep up with us on our Instagram, @sayde.band, where we post covers, snippets of our original music and all the information on where and when you can watch us live next! 

- Alexis Mpanga

Can you imagine being featured in the next eureqa! edition? Use the sign-up form and tell us about your venture! 👉Register your interest here

Join the eureqa! WhatsApp community for more exciting news, announcements and events. 🎉