This Is How She Is Helping Experts & Students Build India’s Largest Mentorship Community
Meet Anapurna Monga- the founder and CEO of Mentorbox, an education company that helps in choosing and navigating the right career path.
An Alumnus from the prestigious Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology (MNNIT), Anapurna has been an experienced professional working as a Software Engineer in the Logistics, Healthcare and Payments Domain before stepping into the shoes of entrepreneurship.
She has also previously co-founded a startup named ‘Jivasutra’ which was basically an Ayurvedic services aggregator and focused on providing holistic healing to end-users. Prior to starting Mentorbox, she was working with India’s fastest growing payment domain start-up ‘PineLabs’ where she spearheaded the launching of a new product-EPOS (Electronic-Point-of-Sale) for contactless payments for small merchants amidst the COVID crisis.
Her Ed-Tech startup, Mentorbox, focuses on providing accessible mentorship to students in schools/colleges as well as to young professionals. Talking about her venture, she says- “My vision is to mentor the young talent of India through my mentorship programmes and make the country self-sustainable and inclined towards creating in-house products rather than relying on foreign brands.” She aims to tackle the confusions of people regarding becoming a software engineer or a designer; a business analyst or a consultant; a job at a Tech company or Non-Tech one; Pursuing an MS or an MBA, etc. and help them see a clearer picture about their career based on their talent and capabilities.
In a country like ours where there is a lot of talent but a significant lack of mentorship, proper coaching and guidance, we dread going ahead and making a mark in our lives. Mentorbox strives to give India a new shape and help empower people through the right kind of guidance. It brings to you the best minds in the industry to collaborate and get mentored from and connect the right mentors to the right mentees by discovering your true potential and what exactly you should you be focusing on in your career. In fact, it has professionals ranging from top-notch companies such as Google to individual experts who have made it big as entrepreneurs. Apart from this, it also provides services which give great value and content related to the education sector to its clients, that is still a pain point in the current Indian scenario.
“It was pretty difficult to build Mentorbox. From establishing a brand to convincing people and creating an impact, it wasn’t easy at all. For me, the biggest challenge was recruitment because I could not work on everything on my own. I fetched people, I convinced them about my goal, worked really hard for things to fall into place and what you see today is the sheer result of all that hard work,” she says as she reminisces about her initial days of struggle. Such experiences also led her to become a motivational speaker and till date she has spoken for many International startups, one of them being ‘Alariss’. She was invited there as a distinguished podcast speaker on gender disparity and woman empowerment. In recent news, she has also started speaking up about women empowerment through a series of LinkedIn posts with the title ‘Women-with-a-Voice’.
Looking at her present, Anapurna feels proud of being a lady who broke barriers and never let herself down no matter how people treated her in her journey. “I am proud of it because it is tough to reach at such a stage, considering the patriarchal society we live in. At Mentorbox, I make sure that people are able to see a stark difference in their life and the trajectory at which they move ahead because I also saw myself in their position when I had just begun,” she says.
