A small refugee-founded outfit in East London.
Mendee was started in 2022 by a refugee who couldn't find decent multilingual information about the UK asylum process — so he wrote it himself. Four years later it's still mostly the same three people, the same three rooms in Bow, and a community of 2,000+ Russian-speaking and Central Asian refugees we built quietly, person by person. We're not a scaled organisation. We do specific work for a specific audience that bigger players don't reach.
What we are
A refugee-founded social enterprise in East London. Three full-time people, six small social programmes, one commercial translation service. About £97K of grants in four years (Greater London Authority, Innovate UK, QMUL). Winner of the Mayor of London's Challenge LDN 2023 — selected as one of seven companies from a few hundred applicants. Most of our hours are still volunteer hours. The community of 2,000+ on Telegram and WhatsApp built itself through word of mouth.
The work is small in absolute terms, specific in audience, and continuous in commitment. We've been doing it for four years and intend to keep doing it.
What we are not
- Not scaled. ~£94K / year operating budget. We're not Crisis or Refugee Council.
- Not technologically novel. Our AI runs on open-source models on a Mac Mini in the office. Our directory aggregates public registers. Anyone could rebuild any of it. The point is that we did, and we keep it running.
- Not a one-stop shop. We work with a specific audience — refugees and migrants from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Central Asia. For Arabic, Farsi, Pashto, or Somali speakers, much better orgs exist. We point people to them.
- Not promising the moon. Mendee AI Station is genuinely pre-pilot R&D — a deck and an idea, not a product. We say so on its page.
Why a CIC + LTD structure
Most social enterprises blur the line between "we do good" and "we sell things". We separate them by law:
- Mendee CIC (Companies House 15445605) is an asset-locked Community Interest Company. It runs all our programmes — StartNewLife, Skybow, She, SiBot, and the dream-stage Mendee.Water. Funded by grants, donations, and revenue from the Ltd. Free for everyone who uses it.
- Mendee Digital Ltd (Companies House 14071822), trading as PRVD.LDN, is the commercial arm. It provides certified translations and runs svoi.uk, a curated affiliate hub for migrants. Net profit cross-subsidises the CIC by deed.
Why this matters: funders who give to Mendee CIC see grant money stay 100% in social impact. Customers who buy translations from Mendee Digital Ltd know their fees fund refugee programmes they may never meet. Auditors love it. So do we.
How it started
In 2022, the founder arrived in the UK as a refugee and realised the practical information he needed — how to register with a GP, how to claim asylum properly, how to open a bank account without a fixed address — didn't exist anywhere in his language, for free. So he wrote it. The community grew slowly through people forwarding the Telegram link to friends.
By the end of 2022, Mendee Digital Ltd was incorporated to commercialise the translation work he'd been doing for friends free of charge since arrival. The first external endorsement came that year from the Queen Mary University of London Grow It Awards (Santander Universities) — £3,000. Small money but the first outside person saying "this is worth doing".
In 2023, two larger grants: £48,000 from the Greater London Authority's Mayor's Challenge LDN (Poverty Prevention — selected from a few hundred applicants as one of seven winners) to build SiBot, and £46,500 from Innovate UK for AI R&D.
Between July 2024 and January 2025 the founder had four eye surgeries and nearly lost his sight. Development paused; the community kept going; we kept helping where we could. Mendee CIC was formally incorporated in 2024 to hold the social programmes under an asset-locked structure that survives founder departure — a lesson the eye surgeries taught us.
What we do today
See the programmes page for the full social-impact line-up, and the services page for the commercial side. The impact page has the numbers.
Where we work
Workspace Lock Studios, 7 Corsican Square, London E3 3YD. Bow, East London. The same address houses our Mac Mini that runs the SiBot RAG pipeline 24/7 — local AI, local hardware, no cloud dependency.
Team
Three people. Bow, East London.
All Mendee CIC programmes are run by people with lived migration experience. Not a recruitment policy — just how it grew.
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Founder & Director
Refugee background. Innovate UK grant recipient. GLA Mayor's Challenge LDN 2023 winner. Founded Mendee Digital Ltd in 2022 and Mendee CIC in 2024.
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Suhayl Odiljonzoda
Director, Mendee CIC
Native Tajik speaker. Community liaison for Central Asian beneficiaries. Translates and adapts content for Tajik, Uzbek, and Kazakh communities. Came to the UK as a refugee himself.
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Vladislav Chirjoi
Technical Operations Lead
Data processing and technical implementation. Multilingual workflow automation. Maintains the SiBot RAG pipeline and content translation infrastructure.
Want to fund, partner, or join
One email reaches everyone who needs to see it.
Grant officers, impact investors, partner organisations, journalists, potential team members — all of you reach us at the same address. We reply with one human, usually within 48 hours.