mentorship-platform
(3)
PalmDrive, Inc.
PalmDrive (棕榈大道) is an education-technology company that connects students - mostly Chinese students aiming for top overseas universities - with a network of thousands of mentors who have themselves attended those schools. Founded by Stanford, Berkeley, and Harvard alumni in 2013, PalmDrive pairs one-on-one mentorship in admissions, cultural integration, and career planning with an online platform that has drawn a community of more than a million students. The company operates across China and Silicon Valley and has raised over US$10 million in venture funding.
Tina Sheng
Tina Sheng is the CEO of PalmDrive USA, the North American arm of PalmDrive, an international education and mentorship company. A Stanford-trained educator who grew up in Beijing, she built her career inside Bay Area high schools as an admissions officer, teacher, and college counselor before founding PalmDrive's undergraduate department in 2015. Under her leadership the team has guided hundreds of students into top-20 universities including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT, and helped grow PalmDrive into a venture-backed company serving thousands of students annually.
Somethings
Somethings is a New York-based digital mental health company that connects teens and young adults (ages 13-26) with trained, certified near-peer mentors in their 20s for real-time text and video support. Built around lived experience rather than clinical therapy alone, every mentor is background-checked, certified as a peer specialist, and supervised by licensed clinicians. The company sells primarily to states, Medicaid managed-care plans, schools, and community organizations as an early-intervention layer in the youth mental health system.