Raoul-Gabriel Urma

For the young Raoul-Gabriel Urma there was no limit on books. He remembers real-time strategy games, such as Civilisation and Age of Empire, very fondly. These books and games were the catalyst for creating HTML web sites to teach others.

Undergraduate and masters degrees at Imperial College London, followed by Cambridge and a PhD exploring source code analysis, all before he was 23.

Raoul is still hugely motivated by intellectual thought and discovery, applying it to real world problems with a generous dollop of competitiveness in the mix. Not content with reading he’s now co-authored a number of successful programming books, including Modern Java in Action, due for a third edition in 2022 and Real World Software Development, published in December 2019. And yet, beyond the PhD, academia wasn’t for him, he wanted practicality and application. Raoul saw starting an education technology business as a way to combine his passions, make a significant, quantifiable impact and enjoy the freedom that comes with founding a company.