7,000+ Students in 65 Days: What We Learned Building Cafy

A longer update from the Cafy team

Sixty-five days ago, Cafy was a small platform trying to solve one specific, stubborn problem: students in the UK had no reliable way to know which employers could actually sponsor them. Today, over 7,000 students have signed up to use it. We wanted to write this less as a victory lap and more as an honest, slightly longer note on what that number tells us, what it doesn't, and where we think it points next.

This isn't a press release. It's closer to the update we'd send a friend who asked how things were actually going - the real reasons behind the number, not just the number itself.

Why We're Sharing a Number at All

Growth numbers on their own don't mean much. Plenty of platforms hit big sign-up counts and still fail the people using them. What matters is why students kept coming back once they'd tried it, and whether the problem we set out to fix is actually getting fixed for them. Every one of those 7,000-plus sign-ups started the same way most job searches do - a student stuck applying blindly, unsure which of the roles in front of them were even worth the hour it takes to tailor a CV. That's the gap Cafy exists to close, and this number is really just a proxy for how many people are living with that exact problem right now, at this exact moment, on a visa clock that doesn't pause for anyone.

We also think there's value in being specific about a milestone rather than vague about "growth." A lot of companies talk about momentum without ever naming a number. We'd rather say exactly what happened - 7,000-plus students, 65 days - and let people judge for themselves whether that's meaningful.

The Gap That Got Us Here

The UK job search was never really built with students in mind. Sponsorship information is scattered across a government register most people don't know exists, a handful of job boards mix sponsor and non-sponsor employers with no way to tell them apart, and CVs disappear into ATS systems that were never explained to the people relying on them. None of that is a skills problem. It's an information problem, and it costs students weeks they don't have.

We'd describe the gap in three parts, because that's genuinely how it kept showing up in conversations with students before we built anything. It was fragmented - sponsorship data, job listings, and CV advice living in completely separate places with no single source of truth. It was inefficient - hundreds of applications, tracking by spreadsheet, CVs retailored by hand for every single role, hours lost to jobs that were never going to sponsor anyway. And it was, frankly, unfair - the UK has well over 140,000 verified sponsors, and most students we spoke to had never heard of more than a handful of them. Talented graduates were leaving the UK not because they weren't good enough, but because the path that was actually open to them was never made visible.

Cafy was built by people who went through exactly that as students themselves, which is part of why the response over these first 65 days hasn't felt like luck to us. It's felt like a problem finally getting the tool it should have had from the start.

What Students Have Actually Been Saying

The feedback that's stuck with us most isn't about any single feature. It's the pattern behind it. Students at Manchester have told us the sponsorship check alone saved them hours they used to spend cross-referencing companies by hand before applying. A student at Exeter said the CV feedback was the first time she understood why her applications weren't getting responses, rather than just being told to "tweak a few things." Someone at Oxford described the biggest win as not having to guess anymore - sponsorship status, CV strength, and applications all sitting in one place instead of three.

A recurring theme from students at Liverpool has been the Chrome extension becoming part of their daily routine - being able to see sponsorship status and a fit score while browsing jobs, rather than having to stop and check separately every time something looked promising. And more than one student has told us, in different words, the same underlying thing: for the first time, it felt like having a complete system for landing a sponsored role, instead of another job board that treated visa status as someone else's problem.

That's the thread running through most of what we hear - less about any one clever feature and more about the relief of finally having a system instead of a spreadsheet, a browser full of tabs, and a running mental list of which companies might sponsor.

What Students Have Actually Been Using

It's worth being specific about what's inside the platform, since the milestone doesn't mean much without the product behind it. Cafy brings together seven tools around one dashboard, all built specifically for the UK sponsored job search rather than adapted from a generic international version.

• Smart Job Match Extension - an instant fit score and keyword analysis for any job posting, right in the browser, before a student decides whether it's worth applying.
• AI CV Builder - tailors a CV to the exact job description in front of a student, rather than sending the same generic version to every employer.
• Visa Sponsorship Analyser - checks visa sponsorship status for any company instantly, cross-referenced against 140,000-plus verified sponsors.
• AI Mock Interviews - realistic practice questions tailored to a student's target role, rather than generic interview prep.
• Sponsor Job Board - a dedicated board that only ever shows roles from verified sponsors, with nothing else mixed in.
• Automatic application tracker - every role, deadline, note, and follow-up organised in one dashboard, without manual spreadsheet entry.
• 1:1 career counselling - sessions with counsellors who each came to the UK as students themselves and landed a sponsored role of their own.

None of these tools exist in isolation from each other, which is really the point. A student finds a role through the extension or the job board, checks sponsorship in seconds rather than minutes, tailors a CV against that specific listing, and tracks the whole thing automatically instead of losing track three weeks later. That loop, repeated a few hundred thousand times across 7,000 students, is where we think the actual value of the last 65 days has come from.

What This Milestone Doesn't Mean

Seven thousand students is a starting point, not a finish line. It doesn't mean the sponsorship problem is solved, or that every student using Cafy has landed an offer, or that the platform is finished growing into what it needs to be. We're sharing this number because it's real and it's meaningful to us, not because it's the whole story.

We're also conscious that a sign-up is not the same thing as an outcome. Plenty of students who sign up are still early in their search, still building their shortlist, still working through their first tailored CV. The actual measure of whether any of this is working is quieter than a sign-up count: whether more students are ending up in sponsored roles because the search stopped being a guessing game. That's the number we care about far more than the one in this post's headline, even though it's harder to put on a stat card.

Why This Matters More on a Graduate Visa Clock

A lot of the students who've joined in these first 65 days are on, or approaching, the Graduate visa - two years, three for a PhD, to work in the UK without needing sponsorship lined up first. That window exists specifically so graduates have time to find and secure a Skilled Worker role before it runs out, but two years goes quickly once job searching, interviews, and offer negotiation are all accounted for. Every week spent applying to companies that were never going to sponsor is a week taken directly out of that runway. If the last two months have shown us anything, it's how much of that wasted time was avoidable with the right information in front of a student from day one, rather than discovered by trial and error over a full search.

What's Next

Nothing about the mission changes because of a number. Cafy still exists to make the UK job search navigable for students who came here to build a career, not to decode a visa system on top of everything else. That means continuing to keep the sponsor register accurate as it updates in real time, sharpening the tools students already rely on based on exactly the kind of feedback described above, and staying close to the same direct conversations with students that got us to this point in the first place.

We don't want to overpromise a roadmap in a post like this. What we can say honestly is that the next 65 days matter more to us than the last ones - because a platform is only as good as what it does for the next student who's stuck, not the one who already found their footing.

For Students Who Haven't Tried It Yet

If you're a student still applying without knowing which of those applications could actually lead anywhere, that's exactly who this was built for. It's free to start, there's no card required, and the sponsorship check alone tends to save people the exact kind of hours the students above described.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many students are currently using Cafy?

Over 7,000 students signed up in the platform's first 65 days, across universities throughout the UK.

Is Cafy free to use?

Yes. Cafy offers a free plan with core application tracking, basic CV templates, and the job match extension, with no credit card required to get started. Premium plans add unlimited AI CV tailoring, cover letter generation, mock interviews, and the full analytics dashboard.

What makes Cafy different from LinkedIn or Indeed for students?

General job boards list every employer side by side, including ones that cannot legally sponsor a visa. Cafy only indexes companies on the Home Office Register of Licensed Sponsors, so every listing on the platform is one a student is actually eligible for.

Is Cafy only for students at certain universities?

No. Students from universities across the UK use Cafy, including Manchester, Liverpool, Exeter, and Oxford among others, and the platform is built for any student or recent graduate navigating the UK sponsored job market, regardless of institution.

What tools are actually included in the platform?

Seven core tools: the Smart Job Match Extension, AI CV Builder, Visa Sponsorship Analyser, AI Mock Interviews, Sponsor Job Board, an automatic application tracker, and 1:1 career counselling with counsellors who navigated UK sponsorship themselves.

Does using Cafy guarantee a sponsored job offer?

No tool can guarantee an offer. What Cafy does is remove the guesswork around which companies can legally sponsor a visa, which applications are worth the time, and where a CV is falling short, so the effort a student puts in goes toward roles that were always reachable.

If you're part of the next 7,000, the platform is free to start at cafy.careers.

Figures reflect Cafy's own platform sign-up data as of the time of writing.