India’s higher education market is one of the largest in the world, with over 40 million students graduating annually. Navigating the complexities of this vast and diverse market presents significant challenges, particularly for EdTech companies aiming to make a meaningful impact in a developing economy. Arunabh Varma, founder and CEO of Intercell, has achieved something remarkable by building a pioneering career mentoring platform in this space. His journey from corporate success to EdTech entrepreneurship highlights the determination and vision required to grow a company in a rapidly evolving market.
In this EdTech Mentor Founders Edition, Arunabh shares how Intercell connects students with industry professionals for personalized mentorship, providing invaluable guidance through AI-driven solutions. He discusses the unique challenges of scaling in India’s diverse educational landscape and reveals how Intercell is poised for global expansion, particularly in the US.
Join us for this insightful conversation where Arunabh offers candid reflections on the lessons learned as a bootstrapped founder, the evolving role of mentorship, and his ambitious vision for the future.
Sure. I was born and raised in New Delhi, the capital of India. I come from a family of doctors. My father is a senior neurologist, and both my sisters are doctors, married to doctors. I’m the only one who didn’t pursue medicine, as my father, being the main financial decision-maker and my career builder, chose not to invest in that path for me. I completed a bachelor’s degree in Electronic Commerce, which is a three-year program, and after that, I worked for a telecom company for about a year. Then, I went on to do my master's in Advertising and Marketing.
After completing my education, I worked for various industries, from IT and telecom to real estate and startups. My last corporate job was with a German luxury automobile brand, during the time I met one of my mentors in US through Linkedin He inspired me to start Intercell. The idea for Intercell first came to me in 2007, while I was working at a multinational company and actively using LinkedIn. I attracted attention from many students seeking career advice, especially regarding getting into large companies.
Over time, I gained experience in sales, marketing, technology, consumer research, and business planning, which prepared me for entrepreneurship. My mentor, a successful entrepreneur himself, encouraged me to bring this idea to life. In 2018, I quit my job, founded Intercell, with the help ofan incubator. Later I raised some initial funding from my best friend, family, and a celebrity investor who’s still with us. And recently we got endorsed by the Ministry of Education in India. We’ve been bootstrapping ever since and are now seven years old, looking to expand beyond India.
Yes, great question. Initially, we started with a B2C focus. We launched the product in India with some social media marketing, and while we had some early interest, it didn’t pick up as we hoped. We thought the service would grow organically through word of mouth, but we experienced a drop in growth after the initial customers.
That’s when we pivoted to B2B, recognizing that colleges and universities were where we could find a captive audience. India has a huge number of institutions—around 50,000 colleges and universities, with 40 million graduates each year. We decided to target training and placement departments, where colleges already allocate budgets for student career readiness. By positioning Intercell as part of this process, we found a better market fit.
We kept improving the product based on feedback, always with the end goal of helping students better prepare for their careers. We built Intercell as a fully in-house SaaS product, driven by AI, available on Android, iOS, and the web. It provides students with access to over 5,000 global mentors, 70% of whom are from India and 30% from countries like the US, UK, Canada, and Australia.
Within minutes, students can match with an industry mentor using AI, and they receive one-on-one mentoring that spans six months. The program includes assessments and mentoring reports, helping students identify whether they need to change their specialization, improve soft skills, upskill, or prepare for interviews. We haven't entered the K-12 space yet, but we are planning to offer services to high school students soon.
In addition to education, we identified an opportunity for corporate mentoring. We customized our product for larger companies to foster a mentoring culture across their global teams. We help HR departments identify potential mentors, train them, and provide tools for mentoring their employees. This has become a SaaS-based subscription service.
We've been operating in India for seven years, serving both educational institutions and corporations. We're also developing new AI-based tools, like MentorDNA, which assesses a mentor's skills in about 30 minutes. For students, we created a talent-finder tool that helps them discover their hidden talents in just 30-35 minutes. We plan to launch in the US soon, hopefully through partnerships and collaborations.
Yeah, sure. Great question, Laureano. India is a very diverse country with 29 states, 38 official languages, and about 400 unofficial languages. Around 29-30% of our population is urban, while the rest is non-urban, so there’s a clear divide, though both sectors are growing. Our population is massive, around 1.4 to 1.5 billion, with about 50 babies born every minute. Those are the numbers we’re dealing with.
Now, if you compare North and South India, they’re quite different. The North is more Western-influenced, with higher disposable income, international travel, and a strong presence of traditional and manufacturing businesses. The South, on the other hand, focuses more on IT, computer science, and engineering, with a strong presence of multinational and national tech companies. Family values are more conservative in the South, with more joint families compared to the North, where people tend to be more open-minded and fewer joint families exist.
Because the South is heavy on IT, colleges and universities there understand that parents expect their children to get jobs in that field. So, there’s a supply chain where engineering and IT courses dominate. We see many Indians from the South in the US, especially in Silicon Valley, as this has been a trend for years.
When it comes to job expectations, there’s a difference based on economic backgrounds. In North India, the cost of education is higher, so families expect higher salaries after graduation. In the South, except for some metropolitan areas, the cost of education is lower, so the salary expectations are more modest. This dynamic defines the educational sectors in the North and South. The West, particularly Mumbai, is more media and entertainment-centric, like Los Angeles in the US. The Northeast is a completely different market and can’t really be compared to the North or South. Does that answer your question on how expectations in India are shaped?
Great question. Since we’re a SaaS and tech-based platform, the 5,000 mentors we have aren’t employees—they’re industry professionals with 10 to 30 years of experience, covering 250 career specializations. Each mentor provides us with multiple hourly slots per week. When you do the math—52 weeks a year, each mentor offering multiple slots a week—that means we can currently cater to 10 million students annually with our present capacity.
Everything is automated, from pre-assessment to post-assessment, with automated notifications ensuring both the mentor and student meet on the platform on time. Payments are processed automatically when the mentoring program is completed. So, in a way, we’re delivering mentoring even while we sleep. We’re heavily inspired by WhatsApp, which had only 35 employees when it was acquired by Facebook but managed to scale massively.
As we continue to grow, we know how to expand to meet demand, and we're preparing for larger scale-ups, like when state governments in India adopt our services for mentoring hundreds of thousands of students. We’re also exploring the idea of junior mentors, as we’ve noticed that some students, particularly in the South, are shy about speaking with senior professionals. They prefer younger mentors who’ve recently graduated and can relate to their experiences. We're adapting to the market’s needs as we expand.
Exactly. We’ve found that mid-level professionals are more tech-savvy, have more time to mentor, and often seek additional income to cover expenses like EMIs or utility bills. They’re the perfect demographic to target as mentors. We don’t typically onboard CXO-level professionals because they’re busy and have high expectations. They’re better suited for platforms like Gartner. Our focus is on democratizing access to industry professionals who are ready and willing to mentor students. That’s where our product fits.
Sure. Since I’ve had a lot of exposure to marketing, both offline and online, and have studied the digital consumer journey—mapping it from A to Z—I’ve applied that knowledge and industry training across multiple companies to what we do. On LinkedIn, we use a bot to reach out to mentors who have 10 to 30 years of experience in specific career specializations. We created this bot internally, inspired by automation, to handle the initial induction and introduction.
We focus on key selling points, like philanthropy, the opportunity to earn extra income, social media recognition, and giving back to society. These elements have been packaged together as a pull factor, and as a result, we haven’t faced any challenges in acquiring mentors through LinkedIn or digital marketing. We fit well with the platform’s algorithms.
When it comes to recruiting institutions, that’s part of our marketing strategy. We target specific groups and networks of training and placement officers. We also sponsor education events, where our sales team engages with these contacts, offering free trials for two or three students on their campus. Everything is virtual, and we deliver the results within 10 days. The feedback is overwhelmingly positive, with students appreciating the personal, one-on-one mentoring from senior professionals, which they’re not used to. Typically, institutions offer lectures, seminars, and one-to-many webinars, but we cut through that noise. We don’t do one-to-many at all.
We’ve built what I like to call a “career hospital,” drawing from my background in a family of doctors. Like the personal and private conversation between a doctor and patient, our mentoring conversations between a mentee and mentor are sacrosanct. It’s one-on-one and takes place on our own custom-built video conferencing platform, not on Zoom or Teams. We’re obsessed with mentoring, and that’s all we do.
That’s a good question. We realized that students in smaller Tier 2 and Tier 3 towns don’t have laptops or desktops, but they do have smartphones. These students have big ambitions, and we wanted to empower them. That’s also where the larger business volume is. The top business schools or well-funded colleges may have better access to industry professionals for one-to-many sessions, but medium and smaller towns don’t have access to these opportunities. That’s one reason we went mobile-first.
On the other hand, LinkedIn has really changed the habits of professionals in India and globally. But LinkedIn’s web product offers more features than the app, which means professionals tend to use desktops or laptops more for LinkedIn. Our mentors are industry professionals, so we realized they prefer doing video conferences on desktops or laptops. That’s why we created a different experience for them on desktops and laptops while keeping the app simpler for students. As a result, 80-90% of our mentors use desktops and laptops, while 80-90% of students access the platform on their smartphones.
Sure. One mistake I made was giving away too much equity to my incubator. With all due respect to him—if he reads this later, that’s okay—but I was naive. I wasn’t from the startup or investor world, and I probably should have discussed it with my mentor, but it slipped my mind. I was caught up in the excitement of starting the business in 2018, and I gave away more equity than I should have. He helped me a lot in the early stages, and I wouldn’t have come this far without him, but that’s one lesson I learned: don’t give too much away. Stick to giving 5-15% equity early on, and no more.
Another lesson, which I wouldn’t exactly call a mistake but a learning experience, is that I should have spent less on marketing when we launched in B2C. I spent too much initially and could have tested the market with just 20% of that budget to get feedback before pivoting to B2B. But hey, that’s part of the learning process.
Yes, I didn’t use my budget efficiently. I ended up doing an international ad shoot in New York because we wanted to attract global mentors. We spent a lot of money on a 45-second commercial in Manhattan, produced by an agency based in New York. While the ad did help us acquire mentors globally, it didn’t bring in any B2C customers in India. That’s something I could have avoided early on.
We hired an advertising agency in New York. My incubator and I made those decisions together. I’ve handled marketing budgets for multinational companies, so I was confident. But this was my own company, and I should have been more cautious about spending so much on marketing so early.
Yeah, we should have gone with still images instead of doing a full video shoot, hiring a model, studio, and agency. A soft launch on social media, targeted at potential customers, would have been better. Instead, we made what I’ll call a “brand film.”
Totally agree.
Well, in India, there are a few companies that have done exceptionally well, creating new categories and putting India on the global stage. While I can't name them specifically, I am inspired by all the successful EdTech companies in India, even those that faced setbacks and legal issues. When you're building a new category in a growing economy, it takes a lot of guts and risk. The early EdTech companies in India did a great job establishing the sector. Whether they succeeded or not, they’ve inspired others to innovate and provide more value, whether for K-12 students, higher education, or corporate professionals gaining access to international degree content. I have great respect for all EdTech entrepreneurs and founders in India. It’s a tough market, especially now that the bubble has burst, and many companies shut down, but many also survived. When I compare the EdTech markets of India and the US, the US is definitely more scalable. India has its growing economy challenges, but that makes success even more rewarding.
The biggest challenge is securing a sustainable runway. In EdTech, like in healthcare, you’re dealing with institutions pushing for profits, but you also want to make an impact. When we go to smaller towns, colleges might like our product but say they can’t afford it because their students come from weaker economic backgrounds. As a private, for-profit company, we can't just give the product away or drastically lower our price point. That creates a dilemma for me because I want to help these students succeed, but as a bootstrapped company, revenue and profitability are essential. If we were venture-funded, the focus would shift even more to revenue, profitability, and valuation. To really help those students, we’d have to burn cash or transition into a nonprofit or NGO, which isn’t our business model.
For example, a few months ago, we had a big institution in a small town in southern India agree to roll out our service for 30,000 students, but the price they were willing to pay was peanuts. It’s tough because ultimately, those students miss out on industry help, which isn’t right. Balancing philanthropy with profit is one of the hardest parts of running this company.
We use AI primarily to match mentees with the appropriate mentor through a pre-assessment process. Based on the outcome of the mentoring program, AI also helps students find the best internship or job opportunities. We’re creating algorithms to map the input and output—essentially, because a student was mentored by a specific industry professional and had certain outcomes from the program, we recommend the best-fit career path, internship, or job.
Additionally, we’re integrating various AI tools and building our own into various stages of the mentor-mentee relationship to gather more data over time. We’ve also developed AI tools like the MentorDNA Assessment, Talent Finder, and Mock Interview tools. These tools help students prepare for interviews, identify their hidden talents, and assess mentors' capabilities. We’re constantly building new AI products around the core concept of one-on-one mentoring to help students accelerate their careers more effectively.
Since we’re creating a new category in India, it’s a tough market to crack, but we’ve come close to doing it. We’re the only company in India that has developed and packaged career mentoring in this way. Our goal is to establish Intercell as synonymous with career mentoring for higher education across India’s 29 states and both public and private colleges. That’s the scale we’re aiming for, and we’ll need funding to get there.
We’re currently in discussions for funding, and 20% of that will go toward starting operations in the US. We’ve identified 500 universities in Texas, 500 in California—around 1,000 universities where we can start selling immediately. What’s interesting is that 70-80% of students at these universities are from Asia. We’ll help map their career journey, starting with mentoring in India and continuing when they arrive in the US. We’re developing that product now.
In addition, there are two companies in the US doing well in corporate and education mentoring, but not many in the B2B space. We see a big opportunity to provide better value at a lower price, and we plan to compete with those companies soon. From the US, we’ll expand to the UK, Australia, and the APAC region. The vision is for Intercell to become synonymous with career mentoring in higher education and corporate sectors globally.
Sure. Our strategy includes sponsoring education conclaves, awards, and events in India and the US. We sponsor campus and corporate events to build and position our brand among key audiences. We’re also planning to curate our own events—like hosting wine and cheese parties for training and placement officers, CHROs, and other industry professionals. These are intimate networking events, often held at five-star hotels, where we build relationships in a relaxed environment.
These smaller events work well for us in India, and we’ll apply the same strategy in the US. Sponsorship is key, but we’re not doing above-the-line advertising just yet. We're focused on bottom-up marketing. We’ve partnered with organizations like PeopleMatters, SHRM, and HR communities in India, and we’ll strategically plug into their networks in the US as well. We’re also working with student and education communities in the US, sponsoring events and collaborating with US EdTech companies. We’re in talks with several companies to bundle our product as a value-add, using a revenue-sharing model to sell to higher education and corporate clients in the US.
Definitely! It’s an exciting space to be in. Mentoring has no shelf life—you can do it your entire life because the need for mentoring will always be there. The best part is that the mentors continuously upgrade themselves as they grow in their own careers and businesses. They bring the latest trends from the market directly to the students, enabling a constant transfer of knowledge from experienced professionals to young learners. This cycle of knowledge transfer can go on indefinitely, and it’s incredibly fulfilling to be a part of that.
Arunabh Varma
Absolutely. It only takes a few minutes to inspire someone and change their life. That kind of impact doesn’t come from an AI tool—it happens through genuine, one-on-one human connections.
