UniTalkie

University life runs on group chats that were never built for it. A course exists as a WhatsApp group somebody made in first year; the notes are buried four hundred messages up; nobody is sure who is still enrolled; and anyone with the invite link is in, whether they attend the university or not.

The gap is not messaging — students already have that. It is that nothing connects the conversation to the institution behind it. A group has no idea which course it belongs to, a file has no idea which year it is for, and a student who graduates or transfers stays in the room forever.

A chat platform where the academic structure is real. Signing up detects the student's university and places them in the right academic groups automatically, so the rooms match the courses instead of being assembled by hand. Membership follows enrolment rather than whoever still has the link.

The conversation itself is a full one, not a stripped-back demo: reactions, mentions, replies, forwarding that stays labelled as forwarded, search inside a conversation, polls, link previews, voice notes, and documents that can be read in place rather than downloaded first. Deleted messages leave a marker rather than silently vanishing, so a thread still makes sense afterwards.

Around the chat sits the rest of university life — university events and a calendar with who is attending — and a shared library of material tied to the courses it belongs to. The longer plan is a five-part academic operating system: chat, an AI tutor, the library, study rooms, and mobile. Chat shipped first, deliberately, because the rest is worth nothing if the conversation is not already where students are.

Students did not pick this platform — their university did. That flips the burden: it has to be safe by default rather than safe once configured.

Signing in supports two-factor authentication with recovery codes, and accounts are protected against repeated guessing and against passwords already known to have leaked elsewhere. Uploads are scanned before anyone else can open them. Academic identity cannot be edited — a student can change their name, picture and bio, but not their email or their university details, because those are what the group membership is built on.

Deleting an account does not tear holes in other people's conversations. The person becomes a former member, their personal information and message content are scrubbed, and the thread still reads. Retention is the student's own setting rather than a decision taken for them.

One thing deliberately left out: typing indicators. A steady, low-level signal that everyone can see you thinking is not a feature every product needs, and it was declined on purpose.

UniTalkie is built for university students anywhere, but it does not open everywhere at once. Each country is launched deliberately, because the thing that makes the platform work — knowing which university a student actually belongs to, and which courses that puts them in — has to be built against that country's institutions before anyone there can sign up. A platform that lets anyone claim any university is just another group chat.

It is opening first across Palestine and Israel, then the UAE, with further countries to follow. Each one is a piece of work rather than a switch, and that is the intended pace: a university is only worth adding once the students inside it land in the right rooms on their first day.

The web app has been in production since June 2026, with the marketing site and the app itself kept as separate things so one can change without touching the other.

A native iOS app is built — around forty-six screens, full sign-in, real-time chat that sends immediately and reconciles anything missed while the phone was asleep, the library, and the blocking, muting and reporting tools that any student platform needs. It is finished ahead of App Store submission, which is the next step rather than a claim we are making yet.