Meet Anna Buldakova, CEO and Co-Founder at Mentorship Company: Meander

Meander is an innovative platform for mentoring, supporting thousands of employees across small innovative startups and recognised brands such as Intercom, Miro, Pleo, Uber, Spotify, Adobe, Canva and many more.

On Meander, users can:
– Create a career plan and set career goals with the help of an AI coaching assistant
– Connect and schedule sessions with most relevant mentors to work on their objectives. Our smart algorithm chooses the top matches based on goals, skills, and past experience.
– Receive continuous feedback to identify areas of improvement and track progress.

We are offering solutions both for individuals and for businesses that want to run their own programmes.

How would you describe your company?

Meander is the next-gen mentoring platform for professionals. We use a unique combination of mentoring and AI to help people build professional connections and learn new skills.

Why did you start your company, and what inspired you to do so?

I was a journalist for eight years before I discovered product management. I was lucky enough to find a mentor who helped me learn the basics and get a job as a machine learning product manager in less than three months.

Since then, I have been a true advocate of mentoring. Over the past 10 years, I mentored hundreds of individuals through my own practice and via different programs such as TechStars or the Facebook Startup program. Meander initially started as a way to share insights with mentors across the world and enable access to mentoring for more people.

What problem does your company solve, and for whom?

• With layoffs and tech advancements, people need to be able to stay relevant and upskill.
• At the same time, middle managers who traditionally acted like coaches are stretched and don’t have the same capacity to support people’s learning.
• And hybrid/ remote work decreased opportunities for ad hoc learning as well.

Meander aims to provide a modern solution which enables meaningful connections and personalised learning. We use AI to achieve scale and unlock career insights, and we work with humans to inspire and share high quality advice.

What can we hope to see from your company in the future?

We are expanding our B2C offering to companies, helping them create highly engaging and high quality mentoring programs.