"Origin Stories" from St. Pete Catalyst; Samyr Qureshi, Co-Founder "Knack."

When Knack launched about three years ago, co-founder Samyr Qureshi and his team wanted to help college students find peer tutors.

Now, the company is using its app and its technology to connect students in tutoring and mentoring relationships on about 40 college campuses, while also evolving into a powerful tool for companies like PwC and ConnectWise to find talented prospective workers and for universities to raise their performance-based metrics.

Qureshi was a pre-law student who was drawn to technology after working at Apple and Gartner. He joined forces with three friends, one of them a student at the University of Florida, to launch Knack at UF’s incubator, The Hatchery. An early competition win drew the attention of a venture capital investor in San Francisco, where Qureshi learned about the fundraising process before he decided Tampa was a better location for Knack. Now, Knack is about to close on a seven-figure seed rou