When Welkom-U co-founder and COO Michael Olamide Ojolo landed in Fredericton as an international student, he travelled straight from the airport to his first class at the University of New Brunswick, arriving with his luggage in tow.

The reason for his suitcase-laden entrance was partly his lack of familiarity with Canada. He had not yet arranged accommodations and needed to find a place to stay. His experience inspired him and his three business partners, including CEO Oluwatosin Ajibola, to found Welkom-U — an online platform that aims to help foreign students acclimatize to their new surroundings.

“It’s a bad feeling, having nowhere to go and needing help settling down,” said Ajibola in an interview. “It was pretty much an uphill task for him, and that was really where the idea started. I think all of us wish we’d had the opportunity to settle all of these things from our home countries before we came to Canada.”

The four co-founders, who also include CTO Babajide Sosan and product development head Ifeoluwa Williams, founded Welkom-U while they were students in UNB’s Master of Technology Management and Entrepreneurship program. They started work on Welkom-U in November 2019 and incorporated it in May 2020. Now, they lead an 11-person team.

Between August of this year and last week, they ran a closed test that included 48 customers and six businesses providing services.

Ajibola said his team plans to offer a suite of services to help newcomers to Canada get settled and learn the nuances of local culture, with a longer time horizon than the short orientation programs usually offered by universities.

“There are a lot of people who are in school, who come to Canada and six months down the line, they’re still struggling with understanding what the Canadian culture is like and all of that,” he said. “So there’s no time limit to the content that we have.”

One of Welkom-U’s offerings will be a program to help prospective immigrants arrange housing before they come to Canada. Most landlords require tenants to submit to a credit check, but newcomers to Canada often lack a local credit history. TransUnion, for example, is one of Canada’s two main credit reporting agencies, but does not gather data on people living in Africa and much of Asia.

The Welkom-U team plans to work with credit reporters in their clients’ home countries and submit those records to landlords in lieu of Canadian reports.

When they launch publicly, the website and app will also include services to help foreign students learn about their new hometowns, such as which activities and social events are popular locally, and a currency exchange system.

Welkom-U’s operations have so far been funded by a collection of government grants administered by Fredericton startup hub Planet Hatch, as well as the Ryerson University DMZ incubator and American Express’s Blueprint initiative to fund businesses run by people of colour.

In January, Ajibola and his partners plan to raise a pre-seed funding round. By then, they expect to make Welkom-U available to students throughout Atlantic Canada, with a national expansion to come later.

“We’ve proven the concept now,” said Ajibola. “We’ve serviced a lot of customers, so we understand what is expected for us to scale up.

“And that's why we're going for January. Hopefully by that time, a lot of things around our platform, the mobile app, the web app will all be ready. And then we can go full throttle.”