The freshly infused capital will be used by the startup to scale up its technology and product, marketing efforts, and build career communities on the platform. They are also looking at creating new products, gamifying their content, and building customized information pathways that enable both students and working professionals to understand what it takes to get into their shortlisted/envisioned careers.
Mentoria, a career discovery platform that enables students and early working professionals to discover themselves and their ideal career paths, has raised INR 1.5 crore funding in a Pre-Series A round from Indian Angel Network (IAN). The round also saw participation from marquee investors, including Jayant Mehrotra, who recently retired as CFO, Lodha Group, and Pradeep Jaisingh, Chairman, HealthStart India.
The freshly infused capital will be used by the startup to scale up its technology and product, marketing efforts and build career communities on the platform. They are also looking at creating new products, gamifying their content and building customized information pathways that enable both students and working professionals to understand what it takes to get into their shortlisted/envisioned careers.
The journey of this Mumbai-based startup began with an endeavor to guide India’s youth in discovering themselves and the career they will be happiest and most successful in. Mentoria’s Co-Founder & CEO, Nikhar Arora, who experienced a rather convoluted career journey himself, realized that masses were facing the same dilemma as he was. He wanted to ensure that they make informed and accurate future decisions, especially given the 12,000+ career options available today. After wanting to become a pilot in class 10, engineer in class 12, film-maker and marketer in college, he realized that his passion was to guide people away from confusion and clutter to absolute clarity about their ideal future. He launched Mentoria in 2015 along with his co-founders Dr. Ashish Arora and Juie Divecha.
Mentoria’s platform leverages Artificial Intelligence to suggest a list of ideal career paths for a user based on their psychometric assessment results. This is followed by an online career counseling session with trained and certified career counselors, and access to Mentoria’s immersive Knowledge Gateway with information on 850+ different careers, 3000+ colleges and universities and 100+ hours of mentorship content from experts and professionals across careers/industries. The mentors on Mentoria platform guide a user from the time they sign up until they step into a career they have either discovered or are passionate about. They handhold them from clutter to utmost clarity.
Speaking about the development, Nikhar Arora said, “Most students, in India and globally, end up in courses and careers they will later detest/be suboptimal in. We believe that India’s potential demographic dividend might turn into a disaster if square pegs continue being forced into round holes. No amount of skill development or education can solve the problem of people choosing the wrong career or education path. So, through Mentoria, we are on a quest to transform India and, eventually, the world by enabling millions of people to make informed and ideal career decisions. We intend to create a platform that is the Google of Careers and we are glad to receive support from IAN and marquee investors who have become a part of our journey.”
Further, commenting on the investment, Mr. Jayant Mehrotra, Lead Investor at Indian Angel Network said, “With over 12,000 career options available today and 800 million jobs forecasted to vanish by 2030 due to automation, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality, it becomes overwhelming, extremely challenging and stressful for any individual to make his or her career choice. Using AI, Mentoria will play a game-changing role in mentoring and guiding millions to step into a career they’re passionate about. We are confident that Mentoria will help the youth in evaluating and identifying the right career options which will have a transformative impact on the happiness quotient of the individuals, their families and the society at large. We wish Mentoria the very best.”
The startup has so far enabled over 81,000 students/working professionals, 50+ corporates including Axis Bank, Aditya Birla Capital, L&T Technology Services, and more as well as 50 schools to become CareerReady. The company saw a 4X growth over FY’20-21, despite the ongoing pandemic. They have also built a thriving and engaged community of 250+ counselors and counsellorpreneurs – counselors looking to build/scale their own business using Mentoria’s tools – through their mobile application.
Source: Business World
