Edtech startup Quantel helps you get personal career advice from industry experts

As an undergraduate student of NIT Kurukshetra, Lucky Rohilla realised many peers and college pass outs feel out of their depth when choosing a career path or joining the corporate world. To ease their doubts and put them on a confident footing, he started Quantel in 2019 with friend and batchmate Rishabh Garg.

The Delhi-NCR based startup’s USP is that it facilitates one-to-one mentorship for career guidance seekers by industry experts, unlike existing platforms such as LinkedIn. It aims to offer legitimate advice from those who have achieved career goals.

“We have built this platform to cater to the fundamental information, guidance, and mentorship needs of students, professionals, and career aspirants,” says Lucky. “The current ecosystem holds stagnant and stored content on the internet that quickly becomes outdated given our fast-paced world. It isn’t crafted to the needs of an individual.”

The founders gained these insights after months of research on companies and roles and by talking to faculty and seniors. 

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Initial challenges

As the founders were thinking of the different ways in which the problems faced by students and professionals could be addressed, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. This meant zero face-to-face interactions and meetings and, thus, moving the conversations online. 

The next challenge was picking the right, qualified experts, pitching to them what Quantel was trying to do and convincing them about fees that would make personal consultations affordable. 

“With time, we stabilised with solutions, our platform gained traction, and we settled on having our corporate office in Faridabad,” says Lucky. “We still have a long way to go to make the platform better for users every day.” 

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How it works 

Quantel got off to a start after the founders’ vision about making personalised guidance accessible resonated with some industry experts they had approached. The experts agreed to mentor students as they believed such one-to-one advice could speed up the learning curve and lead to professional success.

On the platform, a user picks an expert from the curated pool of mentors in a variety of domains; the mentor will adhere to the needs and ambitions of the user. The user checks the slots available for that expert and chooses one that fits him or her (the user). The user then makes the full payment in advance for the 1:1 session. 

“Users are charged per session, with fees starting from as low as Rs 200 and going up to Rs 1,500 for a 30-40 minute session with one of our experts,” says Lucky.

Now a team of seven, the founders pooled in an initial capital of Rs 50,000 to set up the company. “We are in the initial stage of product development and have more than 50 beneficiaries,” says Lucky.

Due to some previous initiatives that the team started working on last year, Quantel now has a student base of around 10,000 and has generated a buzz on the campuses of several colleges and universities in India. 

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Market potential

Quantel runs on an aggregator business model, wherein the major portion of the amount charged from users goes to the experts and some of it is the user platform fee, says Lucky. 

According to the Union HRD Ministry, more than 1.5 million students graduate from engineering schools every year, but not many get employed. Startups such as Great Learning and upGrad, and others like Lambda School, Masai School, and Pesto help students develop skills. Startups such as Klarity offer personalised career coaching.

Quantel’s aim in 2021, Lucky says, is “to make an impact on the lives of around a million career aspirants with a strengthened tech stack and expanded services to more verticals that could serve our target audience better.”

(Edited by Lena Saha)