In four years, the young man born in Canada, but who spent most of his life in Ecuador, managed to grow that university program by 630%. From there came the idea of founding a startup that would help close these gaps.
He did a master’s degree in Business Entrepreneurship and Technology at Waterloo and together with the Ecuadorians Diego Robles and Martín Serrano, he founded 1Mentor in February 2021. Diego is a software engineer, he worked developing applications for students at the University of Queensland, in Australia and Martín He has an MBA from Oxford University. Currently, Robles is the CTO of the startup, Serrano the COO and Veintimilla the CEO, but the team also includes talent from Argentina and Venezuela.
“Startups have to arise from a problem that is not being solved. We ask ourselves how we make education evolve at the same time as the industry. We know that it is a huge challenge that is causing a lot of impact on the economy and on society, but as the world is changing, it is impossible for us to continue with the same traditional models of education”, he comments.
According to the recruitment firm Manpower Group, in Mexico 64% of companies do not find the talent they need, when they need it. At the regional level, this figure rises to seven out of 10 organizations, in a context in which the knowledge acquired in the classroom becomes obsolete after five years.
“We are not replacing education,” he emphasizes. “We are making it customizable.” 1Mentor is an ally of the university, which is responsible for students acquiring transversal skills. The startup, on the other hand, helps draw career plans focused on the position that each student wants to obtain in the workplace.
On the platform, each student uploads their resume, the desired position and other job aspirations and automatically the 1Mentor technology analyzes it to identify the strengths and weaknesses of that person.
There are two options, that what the student lacks is learned at the university itself with micro-certifications or through partners. 1Mentor works with Coursera, Udemy, IDX. “One of the visions we have is that the student has to be part of the transformation.”
“There are students who want to be machine learning engineers, but nobody is going to give you an internship like that when you are 18 years old and have no experience. So what we see is that they can do a little bit of software development first, then data analysis, one step at a time until they form a path that allows them to become machine learning.”
A profitable business model
1Mentor manages a price per license, that is, the cost is calculated based on the number of students that the university wants to impact. It started with a pilot program for Purdue University, in the United States.
Veintimilla remembers that from the first call they had with them they were interested in the project. “We still didn’t have the technology, we arrived with a power point and they told us ‘this is the budget, it’s $10,000.’ Where do we sign? ”, He says excitedly.
They later signed with the University of Waterloo. This represented scalability for the school, since it has 41,000 students and when Veintimilla was its employee, he worked manually and could only analyze an average of 400 jobs. Today, 1Mentor analyzes more than 110 million job offers to understand the needs of companies.
“In addition to data partners, we use artificial intelligence and our own technology. Manually, the skills that come out the most are knowing how to send emails and use Word and Excel, but if you put that on your CV they will never hire you. Here if a person wants to be in Machine Learning with data, we know that he needs TensorFlow and SQL. We have a recommendation algorithm that takes care of identifying what are the key skills that people need,” she explains.
Then came a contract with the University of Alberta and with the University of York. The CEO refers that at first they started with 25 students, then with 278 until they reached triple digits in terms of the number of people served. The expectation for this year is to go to the thousands, since in 2022 they raised a pre-seed round for 700,000 dollars by Matterscale Ventures, Reach Capital, Buen Trip Ventures, ASU Enterprise Partners, among others.
With this capital, they not only expanded the team but also set their sights on Latin America. In addition to being in projects with the University of Arizona, it is with the University Promotion Corporation of Ecuador, which are basically the owners of the San Francisco de Quito University. Its focus is also in Colombia and Mexico.
“We are looking for more universities, but conscientiously because that requires an investment on our part to develop technology in Spanish and ensure adaptation to the local labor market,” he says.
According to their mapping data, 90% of students report that 1Mentor helped them increase their employability results, 92% to achieve their professional aspirations. Before applying the startup methodology, 30% said they had a good understanding of what employers are looking for, then the figure went to nine out of 10 about understanding what they need to perfect to enter the job market .
For Veintimilla, the biggest challenge they have faced is learning to undertake. From how to manage the product, how to do marketing, B2B sales, to how to manage the team, how to give feedback and maintain the culture. “There are so many things and you have to do everything. You feel like you never finish, so it’s important to know how to prioritize.”
1Mentor, along with startups KIMPLE, SKALO, Swarmob and Wonderly, won the TPrize open innovation initiative from Tecnológico de Monterrey and Universidad de Los Andes. TPrize was developed at a time when post-pandemic job unemployment grew considerably, becoming a challenge for young people in Latin America. Making an impact and innovating through educational solutions through the use of collective intelligence to design and launch challenges that generate high-impact solutions will be the objective for the following years.