career-coaching
(18)
Leland puts a price on the right advice
Getting ahead often starts with knowing someone who has done it before. Leland turned that advantage into a marketplace - and is taking the same idea into AI training.
AdVentures bets on the space between a degree and a business
In Pakistan, Parvez Abbasi’s venture studio treats startup building, career coaching and corporate training as connected problems. Its most revealing work happens where the classroom meets the market.
Landit wants career coaching off the executive floor
A former venture capitalist had the credentials, the contacts and no clear next step. Landit grew from that awkward discovery into a business selling employers a more personal route to career development.
The Coding School That Put Two People at One Keyboard
Microverse wagered that the missing ingredient in online education was another person. Its global coding school turned pair programming into a daily ritual, then discovered that a job market can rewrite even the cleverest curriculum.
John Koelliker and the Warm Introduction for Everyone
He cold-emailed his way into tech, then built Leland to make that kind of guidance less dependent on luck. The result is a marketplace where ambition gets an appointment, a price, and a person on the other side.
Carol Fishman Cohen Turned an 11-Year Resume Gap Into a New Career Category
A collapsed investment bank gave Carol Fishman Cohen an unexpected exit. Eleven years later, she returned to finance, studied the path back and helped turn the resume gap from a hiring liability into an entry requirement.
The Recruiter Who Went Rogue for Women in the C-Suite
Tracy Saunders spent two decades placing executives for Google, Amazon and Cisco. Then she flipped the model - and built a discreet network that gets senior women hired, paid and promoted without the noise.
Emerge Career
Emerge Career is a New York-based reentry and workforce development company that partners with governments to train and place justice-involved and low-income people into high-paying, AI-resilient skilled-trade careers such as commercial truck driving, HVAC, and diesel technology. Its technology platform combines self-paced vocational coursework, exam prep, trauma-informed career coaching, and job placement, with training delivered in partnership with licensed schools and correctional agencies. Founded in 2022 out of Y Combinator by Uzoma Orchingwa and Gabriel Saruhashi, the company has won state and city contracts from Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York City's Next Mile NYC program.
Jack & Jill
Jack & Jill is a London-based AI recruitment startup that replaces job boards and resume submissions with two conversational AI agents. Jack works for candidates - getting to know their skills and goals in a 10-minute conversation, scanning millions of jobs daily, and introducing them directly to hiring managers, all for free. Jill works for companies, learning what a team needs and surfacing well-matched people on a success-based fee. Founded in early 2025 by Omnipresent founder Matt Wilson and Kular.ai founder Saaras Mehan, the company raised a $20M seed round led by Creandum in October 2025.
Mento
Mento is a performance-coaching platform that pairs leaders and teams with 1:1 executive coaches, adds a lighter layer of mentorship, and uses AI to connect what happens between sessions. Built on an 80/20 coaching-to-mentorship methodology and staffed by former C-suite, VP, and director-level coaches, Mento sells leadership development to companies that want to grow and keep their highest performers. Co-founded in 2019 by Jamie Albers and Alex Marcus, the Los Angeles company counts Anthropic, Dropbox, Brex, Gusto, and Vercel among its clients.
ModernGuild
ModernGuild is a New York-based career mentoring and recruiting company that helps early-career and college students break into finance and consulting. Founded in 2011-2012 by Adrien Fraise, it pairs online career curriculum with live 1-on-1 coaching from in-field practitioners, and has evolved into a B2B marketplace using blinded candidate dashboards and matching algorithms to reduce bias in campus recruiting.
Sayge
Sayge is a New York-based coaching platform that gives everyday employees - not just executives - ongoing 1:1 access to vetted, ICF-certified professional coaches. Founded in 2017 by Jamie Bryan and Katie Stricker under the banner 'Coaching for the Rest of Us,' the company pairs employees with a personal coach, runs biweekly virtual sessions, and hands employers dashboards that track progress and impact. After raising $1.75M in seed funding, Sayge was acquired by employee-benefits platform Bennie in October 2023 and now operates as part of Bennie's benefits suite.
Jamie Bryan
Jamie Bryan is the co-founder and CEO of Sayge, a New York-based platform that democratizes 1:1 professional coaching, taking a perk once reserved for executives and making it available to employees at every level. After 13 years running relationships for global brands at agencies like Ogilvy and Digitas, a single life-changing coaching experience in 2016 sent him in a new direction. He launched Sayge in 2017 under the banner 'Coaching For The Rest Of Us,' and has since built it into a company that has delivered tens of thousands of coaching sessions across dozens of organizations, raising $1.7M in seed funding in 2021.
Adrien Fraise
Adrien Fraise is the CEO and founder of ModernGuild, a New York-based edtech company that pairs high school and college students with one-on-one career coaches and a structured online readiness program. A former Deloitte strategy consultant with degrees from Stanford and Columbia Business School, he launched ModernGuild in January 2011 after concluding that traditional early-career recruiting was broken: too many resumes, too little real review, and too much bias. He built the company into a mentoring marketplace that has served tens of thousands of students, partnered with employers like Citibank and Wells Fargo, and went through the Techstars accelerator in 2017.
Jamie Albers
Jamie Albers is the co-founder and co-CEO of Mento, a Los Angeles career-health company that pairs people with coaches who blend 80% coaching and 20% hands-on mentorship from operators who have done the job before. A University of Pennsylvania grad who spent five years across Google and then ran growth and marketing at Jigsaw, she built Mento after her own executive coach reshaped how she led and felt at work. Mento has raised about $11.5M, including a $6M seed in 2023 backed by M13, and is now folding AI into coaching to make high-quality guidance affordable at scale.
Teal
Teal is a Miami-based AI-powered career platform built for job seekers rather than recruiters. Founded in 2019 by former WeWork executive David Fano, Teal bundles an AI Resume Builder, Job Tracker, job board, Chrome extension, AI Interview Coach, and offer/salary tools into one workspace that helps professionals find, apply for, and land jobs they actually want. The company has grown to roughly 4 million members, has helped facilitate hundreds of thousands of interviews, and has raised about $19 million in venture funding, capped by a $7.5M Series A in January 2025.
Braven
Braven is a national nonprofit career accelerator that partners with large public universities and employers to help first-generation, low-income, and underrepresented college students land strong first jobs. Through a semester-long, cohort-based course followed by post-graduation support, Braven equips Fellows with the skills, confidence, experiences, and professional networks they need to translate a college degree into economic mobility. Founded in 2013 by former Teach For America executive Aimée Eubanks Davis, Braven has reached more than 15,000 Fellows across cities including Chicago, Newark, New York, Atlanta, the Bay Area, and beyond.
Formation
Formation is a San Francisco–based, A16Z-backed virtual fellowship that trains experienced software engineers to land senior roles at top tech companies. It pairs adaptive AI assessments with one-on-one mentorship from engineers at Meta, Google, Stripe and Airbnb to drill candidates on algorithms, system design and modern AI fluency.