Our story

Years ago, I wanted to study abroad for a semester as a free mover: independently, outside the usual exchange agreements, choosing my own destination instead of picking from a short list someone else had already negotiated on my behalf.

I found a university abroad willing to take me. The problem was on the other end. My home institution’s international office had never processed a request like mine. There was no rule against it and no policy that said no. There was simply nothing to point to: no precedent, no checkbox, no prior case to copy from. An office that has never seen a request cannot approve it, no matter how reasonable the request is.

So the answer was no. Not because anyone actively decided I should not go, but because nobody had ever had to decide that before. A rejection built entirely out of missing paperwork is still a rejection, and it tends to sting more than an honest one, because there is nobody to argue with.

If nobody had written down what being a free mover actually meant, the obvious fix was to write it down myself. On Christmas Eve 2018, wearefreemovers went online as a plain blog: one page explaining what free mover mobility is, one listing a handful of destinations, a homepage, and a contact form. Four pages, total, quietly sitting in a very large internet.

Within a couple of years, that page was the first Google result for “free mover.” Not because it was the best-written explanation available. It was the only one. Ranking first against zero competition is not a strategy anyone should be proud of, but it works, and for a while it was the entire strategy.

People started writing in asking for more: a full list of destinations, real comparisons, real answers. There was no university finder, no database, no team. There was me, a spreadsheet, and a lot of evenings spent typing tuition fees and deadlines in by hand, one university at a time. I was trying to do everything myself: answer every message, keep every destination current, make sure nobody fell through the cracks. I already knew that pace could not last, not without someone giving it everything, full time.

My younger brother Andrea finished his own semester abroad in Singapore and came back at exactly the right moment. He saw real traction: free mover mobility was becoming a genuine option among people his age, not a niche curiosity, and he saw a small blog that had quietly become useful to a lot of strangers without either of us really trying to make that happen on purpose.

Andrea brought a double master’s in International Management from Bocconi and Banking & Finance from the University of St. Gallen, plus time spent in venture capital and venture building, watching closely how startups actually scale. I had the technical and content side covered. He had the business side. Every real business needs at least one technical person and one business person, and on that count, the match was instant.

Andrea is the one who modeled wearefreemovers into something that could actually work as a company, not just a helpful website. He took charge of opening the company here in Switzerland, a jurisdiction that turned out to offer real advantages, and somehow did it without the bureaucratic mess you would expect. He also took on what quickly became a full-time job of its own: working directly with universities on what we now call institutional onboarding, the relationship-heavy work of getting an international office comfortable enough with us to actually say yes.

The plan that came out of all this was simple to state and harder to build: the exact same problem existed on both sides. Students could not easily find the right free mover universities. Universities could not easily find the right free mover students, the qualified, well-matched kind, as opposed to a cold email from a stranger they had no way to evaluate. Solving both sides at once was worth far more than an informational blog ever could be on its own.

So that became the plan: turn an informational website into an actual two-sided platform. Free movers apply through one consistent system. Partner universities receive candidates who have already been checked against their own requirements before ever reaching an inbox. wearefreemovers gets paid by the universities, through success-based fees tied to enrollment, not by charging the students. That single decision keeps the incentives aligned on both sides, because the platform only does well when a student actually enrolls somewhere genuinely right for them. The full mechanics, deposits, eligibility checks, and all, live on the how wearefreemovers works page.

wearefreemovers became an actual registered company in the summer of 2024, officially incorporated in Switzerland. The company is certified as Swiss Made Software, which is a real, checkable credential and not just a badge sitting quietly in a footer. By the way, Switzerland is the only country that offers the “Swiss Made” label also for software. Cool!

Our partner network now spans universities across all the six continents, each one vetted before it is listed and kept updated directly by that institution’s own officers rather than scraped from somewhere else. This is what I used to dream about while updating a spreadsheet of available destinations by hand every week.

We are still small and founder-operated, just the two of us: Andrea runs the business side as CEO, I run product as CPO, no outside investors, no office full of people who never had to be a free mover themselves to understand one. Running a lean, bootstrapped company from the most expensive country on Earth to operate in is either a strange decision or proof that the model genuinely works without anyone else’s money propping it up. I am fairly confident it is the second one.

We also started showing up where this exact conversation happens, sitting across the table from international offices at events like NAFSA and APAIE, the same kind of office that, years earlier, did not have a form for any of this. Most now do, and I like to think we had something to do with a few of those.

For students, that means one application system instead of fifteen separate ones, real eligibility answers instead of silence, and an arrangement where the university pays for the value created, not you. For universities, it means a pre-vetted pipeline of free mover applicants who already fit your requirements before they land in your inbox, handled by people who have personally sat on the other side of that exact desk and know precisely how much friction this kind of mobility used to involve.

We are not trying to replace Erasmus or any other organized exchange program. We are trying to make sure that students who do not fit those programs, wrong destination, wrong timing, wrong language, no spot left, are not simply handed a “no” by an office that has never seen their kind of request before. There is somewhere else to send that request now.

None of this started as a grand mission. It started as one annoyed student and a blank form. I did not set out to build a company. I set out to stop being told no by an office that had no idea what I was even asking, and I kept going because it turned out a lot of people were getting the exact same no, for the exact same reason, all over the world.

I would like free mover to become as ordinary a phrase as exchange student, common enough that no international office anywhere blinks when they hear it. I am motivated to keep growing our partner network the way it has so far: not bigger for its own sake, but more carefully chosen, so that wherever a student wants to go, there is a real, vetted option that we would love to pick if we were students. And I want to keep working with students like the ones already applying through wearefreemovers, motivated, well-prepared, exactly the kind of candidate an international office is glad to find in their inbox, just many more of them, in more places.

That last part matters to me because it is already true, not a hope I am waiting on. The students coming through the platform right now are genuinely good, the kind any partner university wants more of. The goal is not to fix that. The goal is to make sure being that kind of student, curious and persistent enough to go looking for an opportunity nobody handed you, stops requiring the amount of luck and stubbornness it took for me, years ago, standing in front of my university’s international office with no form for what I was asking.

If that office had simply said yes, none of this would exist. I am genuinely glad it did not.