Alumni
Niels Baay
Testimonial
Startup Nxus, founded by AMSIB alumnus Niels Baay, has been awarded the €150,000 Rabobank Innovation Loan (RIL) to prevent discrimination in the recruitment process of students and graduates.
“We are very excited to have the Rabobank invest in our mission to provide equal opportunities in the hiring of young professionals and to change the way we prepare today’s students for the skill-focused job market of tomorrow. This investment allows us to scale our solutions across the Dutch education sector, especially at MBO and HBO level, where internship discrimination is a much-addressed issue demanding a solution.”
Niels Baay - AMSIB Alumni
Nxus, a former HBO take-off participant (in collaboration with the Venture Center and supervised by the Entrepreneurship Lectorate and IXA HvA), intends to use the investment to implement their solutions on a larger scale in the Dutch education sector, where internship discrimination is a much-discussed problem. Thanks to the RIL, they can get closer to their mission to offer students and starters equal opportunities on the labor market. This is done by means of a skills passport, a validated overview of the knowledge and skills acquired during the course. Nxus then matches students based on their competencies to companies.
As a basis for the skills passport, Nxus uses the preconditions arising from scientific research on vrij reizen over de arbeidsmarkt , co-written by AUAS professor Dr. Hafid Ballafkih. Nxus is also involved in national pilots of the Integral Skills Passport led by Hans Cremer, lecturer at the AUAS.
About Nxus
Nxus was founded by AMSIB alumnus Niels Baay, 14 hours after he graduated from the International Business program in September 2018. The idea for Nxus came to Niels a year earlier, when he saw that his good Indian friend and fellow student had to apply eight times more often to get an internship interview than his Dutch fellow students, despite better grades and higher motivation. The idea of creating a level playing field by translating education into skills was born.
After participating in the ACE Incubator program in 2019, Nxus received the Take-Off 1 grant of €25,000 from the NWO to investigate the feasibility of solving internship discrimination in MBO.
To date, Nxus is a bootstrapped EdTech startup and consists of an ambitious team of 7.