Arunabh Verma, Founder -; CEO of InterCell

25 Feb 2022 , 11:15 AM

In an interaction with Mamta Maity, indiainfoline.com, Mr. Arunabh Verma, Founder & CEO of InterCell said "We are looking at the next round of funding in 2022 and hopefully we will make a big announcement in sometime."

Tell us something about your founding story

I was an early user of LinkedIN, right after my MBA, I started to network on the platform.  That was my first experience of using a professional network. As I progressed in my career and worked with brands like Audi, Harley Davidson and BMW, I noticed many young professionals connecting with me. They would seek advice on career growth, how to work with big brands and what does it take to succeed in marketing, I used to advice these young professionals from across India and that is when the idea of creating an organisation that provided professional mentoring came to me.

I was working with BMW, when I met one of my mentors, Vinodh Bhat who was the co- founder of Saavan (now Jio Saavan). He and I connected on LinkedIn, he was based in New York and he and I met up when he came down to India. He wanted to understand more about premium and luxury brands, we had many conversations and after listening to his entrepreneurship journey, I was inspired to start my own. I already had the idea of Intercell and it was time to make it real.

What is your business model? 

We are creating a new category, ultimately the objective being how a student or young professional can get structured career mentoring on a platform. the business model is simple where any user who's looking for structured career guidance can register on Intercell  pays us a certain amount and we connect him through technology with  leading industry professionals around the world not only in India.

All of this is constantly being backed by AI and innovation we are always enhancing our product after listening to feedback from customers.

Our mentors come from 30+ countries and have experience of working with 5000+ brands, we offer 250+ career specialisations from Engineering to Design.  Our mentors include professionals from companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google. We even have doctors as mentors who provide guidance to medical professionals

There are many career guidance platforms in the market. What is your USP and how are you different from other market players?

Well our USP is that we are a SAAS base product that has a global audience. We partner directly with universities to offer mentoring services to their students. In addition to that we have an offering for corporates who need mentoring services for their early career professionals
We have done pilot programmes with over 50 universities including OP Jindal, Lovely Professional University,

What kind of technology do you use?

Well we've got pretty much the typical vanilla software codes by use PHP, Angular,  JS. And we also have AWS as our backend server for cloud computing and we are also looking at integrating more tools to keep on enhancing the product and exceed customer expectations
It is ultimately convenience  SaaS product. We have our app on android and iOS.

Till date how many students /professionals have been benefited by Intercell globally?

We have reached out more than 20,000 students and professionals primarily in India since it's a domicile company of India but we do have plans of International expansion soon.

How do you see this market and what is the growth of this segment?

This market is very embryonic in nature which is post K 12 mentoring (after class 12th),  there are no organised players as such who are trying to create this category,  the way we are trying to do it. There are  immense growth opportunities in this segment and there is a lot of saturation in K 12 and there are lot of edtech companies offering courses and becoming resellers within education space but our product is neutral product.

Lastly please tell us if you are looking at next round of funding?

We are looking at the next round of funding in 2022 and hopefully we'll make a big announcement in sometime. We have been fortunate to get Sonu Sood as our co-founder on board. Sonu Sood is very passionate about helping and motivating the Youth of India. He has invested in our vision and we will work together to build this category.