We Got Into the Hult Prize Incubator, and We’re Slightly Insufferable About It

Some emails you delete on sight. Some you star and quietly forget. And every so often one arrives that makes you read it twice, then stand up, then sit back down because your legs have developed opinions of their own.

Ours said “pitchMe had been accepted into the Hult Prize 2026 Incubator”. As we are a Singapore startup teaching people to speak well, and we have just been invited into one of the most selective entrepreneurship programmes going. So, forgive us if we are, for the next few paragraphs, rather pleased with ourselves.

The Hult what now?

In the event you are unfamiliar with this award, think of it as a worldwide casting call for founders who want to do some good and prove it can pay its own way. Tens of thousands of teams from universities across the planet apply each year. Most are politely thanked and sent home. The Incubator is where the survivors go: six weeks of structured graft designed to take a promising idea and make it sturdy enough to stand up in front of strangers and ask for a future.

What makes acceptance sweet is less the certificate and more the verdict behind it. A global panel, with no reason to flatter us, looked at the notion that learning to speak is a problem worth solving, and agreed. That is the bit we keep returning to. We have spent a year being told, gently, that communication is a "soft skill." Hult just filed it under "things that change lives."

Why (in our modest opinion) rightfully belong there anyway.

The polished speaker in the interview room frequently learned their craft somewhere expensive. Debate clubs at the right schools. Drama coaches. Parents who ran meetings for a living and rehearsed answers over dinner. Confidence, it turns out, is often just practice that somebody else paid for. Everyone else is handed the cruellest instruction in the language, "just relax," and left to sink or swim in front of a room.

That is the inequality pitchMe exists to flatten. When the best idea in the room wins on its merits rather than on who sounds the smoothest, everybody gets a better deck of cards. That is an impact story, and it just so happens to be ours.

A small wave to the year before us

We are not the first to wander into this particular forge with a belief about access. The 2025 cohort included Stick 'Em, who set out to put quality STEM education into anyone's hands through a clever kit and self-directed learning. Different subject, same stubborn conviction: that a valuable skill should not depend on the luck of your postcode. They thought it about science. We think it about your voice. 

What the next six weeks hold

The Incubator is not a lap of honour, it is a workshop with the heating turned up. We will be stress-testing whether real people actually improve on our platform, sharpening who we serve first, and submitting our assumptions to people who have built far bigger things and will enjoy poking holes in ours. The goal is plain: walk in as a hopeful early-stage venture, walk out as a business that can carry its own weight and earn its place in the Hult competition proper.

And of course, will be writing it all down here, the good and the bad afternoons, (and mostly nights) alike, because a startup that only publishes its good news is just an advertisement with a blog.

Feel Free to tag along if you’d like

If you run a school, a polytechnic, a university, or a company that has quietly noticed its sharpest people go silent at the worst moments, we would like to chat. And if you are someone who has ever rehearsed a sentence forty times and still heard it wobble out wrong, then this is your story too. So do stay with us. The next six weeks are going to be loud, in the best possible way.