Melbourne based business co-founders and lifelong friends, Heidi Holmes and Lucy Lloyd, have just closed a successful capital raise for their start-up baby, Mentorloop. Think eHarmony but for mentoring (You may well recognise Heidi’s name from her first business venture AdAge, which she sold to Gen George’s OneShift early last year).
Mentorloop is a cloud based platform designed to make mentoring relationships easier to start, run and participate in for corporates, NFPs, government, universities and individuals themselves. It boasts some well-known names on its books, including not-for-profit organisation, Startup Victoria, Australia’s national biotech body, AusBiotech, Government of Western Australia, Monash University, independent organisation, the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE) and Sydney and Melbourne Water.
At a $2 million pre-money valuation, the $300,000 capital raise saw a mix of private investors come on board, including Director of StartupAUS, Glenn Smith (who backed fintech startup Timelio) and angel investor group, Melbourne Angels.
The capital raised will be directed straight into product development – where there will be more of a focus on mobile design and developing Mentorloop’s machine learning algorithm.
This impressive backing should really come as no surprise as low employee engagement and high staff turnover costs Australian businesses billions of dollars each year. In fact, a 2016 Deloitte Millennial Survey found that 63 per cent of millennials reported that their leadership skills are not being fully developed, even though those intending to stay with their organisation for more than five years are twice as likely to have a mentor (68 per cent) than not (32 per cent).
Is mentorship the answer?
The mentoring route is a cost effective alternative to traditional learning and development programs; makes culture more sustainable because employees are spreading it internally; helps with leadership succession and allows efficient knowledge transfer.
- Customers implementing Mentorloop find their mentoring programs exceeding expectations with an average of 80 per cent over-subscription;
- 74 per cent of Mentorloop users engage in their mentoring programs at least once per month;
- 70 per cent of Mentorloop users identify as both a mentor or a mentee, attesting to the fact that mentoring is not a one-way street but something to give and something to learn.
Or to give you that in dollar-signs, mentoring is a subset of two, huge and ever-growing global markets:
- Global Corporate e-Learning market has projections of $31 billion by 2020;
- Talent Management Software market is growing into a $11 billion market by 2020.
How exactly does Mentorloop work?
For the organisation, Mentorloop provides a platform where mentoring administrators can invite, match and manage their program participants. Most importantly, Mentorloop increases accountability and optimises ROI via a simple and intuitive platform that requires no training to get started.
The platform is transforming HR from a cost centre into a profit centre for organisations.
For the individual – the mentors and mentees – Mentorloop is a communication channel, a mentoring relationship planner, a goal setting app and an online journal of their mentoring relationship.
There are essentially two steps to the algorithm that matches mentors with mentees:
- Taking into account a user’s industry, their skillsets, business goals and objectives (outcome-focused);
- Taking into account “softer fields” like whether a user is a beer/wine drinker or a cat/dog lover.
Mentorloop charges a monthly subscription fee to organisations that scales up as the number of users increases.
What is the story behind Mentorloop?
Co-founders Heidi and Lucy have been friends for almost two decades, growing up in regional Victoria and attending the same high-school. The lightbulb moment for Mentorloop came in 2014 when both Heidi and Lucy were making career changes and couldn’t easily connect with the advice and experience needed to grab the next opportunity.
Interestingly, Heidi reflects on the fact that the start-up space was quite a lonely one in 2011 – entrepreneurialism was not as talked about and as mainstream as it is now, so Heidi spent a lot of time trying to find a mentor herself to connect with, who had experience in the start-up scene.
Heidi and Lucy believe every business needs to be capitalising on their greatest resource – their people – because better business and overall life results are created through shared knowledge and experiences.
Mentorloop facilitates this process by providing an accessible, efficient and time-saving alternative to existing modes of adhoc mentoring programs, which are extremely outdated and depend on the likes of spreadsheets and emails.
Mentorloop is bringing mentorship into the modern age.
