Mentor Collective

Mentor Collective is an edtech software and services provider that partners with colleges, universities and employers to design, launch and manage large-scale mentorship programs. The company positions its product as a "Mentorship Operating System" for higher education, combining software, a services team and research-based assessment. Institutions use the platform to recruit upper-division students, recent alumni and industry partners as mentors, deliver on-demand mentor training, and match participants through an algorithm that the company says accounts for more than 80 dimensions of identity. The platform supports both traditional 1:1 structured mentoring and "flash" mentoring, with in-product SMS and messaging, conversation logging, and integrations with SIS, CRM and other campus systems.

Beyond matching, the product is oriented toward measurement and intervention. Administrators can monitor mentorships through a dashboard, track sense of belonging, academic self-efficacy and career readiness across the student journey, segment and export data by cohort, and receive "Flags" that let mentors triage mentee concerns such as financial difficulty or housing insecurity to appropriate campus resources. The company also markets to employers, citing improvements in intern-to-full-time conversion, and to ecosystem partners that embed mentorship into certification, training and regional workforce pipelines.

Founding story

Co-founders James Lu Morrissey and Jackson Boyar began the venture as a side project aimed at helping international students acclimate to American institutions while both were working in management consulting. They took a sabbatical to pursue it full-time, spent roughly a year and a half driving to campuses and largely being turned down before receiving their first contract, and spent down personal savings in the interim. The initial international-student focus broadened to first-generation, low-income, online and adult learners, and in some cases entire incoming freshman classes.

Business model

B2B: institutions and employers contract for the mentoring software together with a dedicated services team that consults on program design, assessment and ongoing support, so that programs run without adding institutional staff burden. Mentors on most programs are volunteers, with some programs offering paid mentoring opportunities.

Paid partnerships with colleges, universities and corporate partners that license the platform and accompanying services.

Traction

The company reports more than a decade of operation with 500,000 mentorships/learners, 200,000 mentors and roughly 200 partners. In 2021 it created over 83,000 mentorships, exceeding the cumulative total of the prior six years, and had trained more than 50,000 mentors since founding. At the time of its 2022 Series A it cited 160+ institutional partnerships and 700+ unique mentorship programs. Named partners include the University of California, Riverside, Florida Atlantic University, University of Wisconsin–Superior, University of Arizona Online and UNC Greensboro. In 2018 the founders described reaching over 35,000 students and 50+ university partnerships.

Latest developments

A press release distribution page lists a subsequent announcement that Mentor Collective appointed edtech and growth executive Patrick Garayta as CEO. The company's current positioning extends beyond higher education to employer and workforce-partner mentorship programs.