Transforming Dreams into Education with Startup Incubator

With its focus on mentoring individuals, especially students in navigating their career direction, and their path ahead, Kohort is a startup of NSRCEL that strives to allow a wider audience to experience mobility and access to professional work while educating themselves and exploring a wide range of career paths. According to its founder, Pavan Sriram, who now works as Head of International Projects, DigitalNorway – EdTech has become a tapped space where all it propagates is academics and marks that one scored and on this basis, sets a possibility.  

Growth and development take place in many areas and do not depend only on the work and the amount of money we earn. Pavan, as the founder of the startup, wanted to make use of his career experiences to help students all across. Tapping into 400 students over the past 7-8 years, Pavan aims at connecting the like-minded and bridging the gap between people and global opportunities, using awareness about foreign education and how to go about choosing for not just yourself but the community you’re part of – similar to how NSRCEL brings people together. There’s a sense of uncertainty that generally arises from being unacquainted with the process of college admissions. At times, many miss out on opportunities due to delayed decisions.  

Due to this, they end up spending a large fortune on admissions through consultants, who often times act as middlemen between these Universities and students. Currently, the higher education advocacy space in particular is filled with advisors who have never been abroad. Their only motive is to get the admission approved, so it can be a bit misleading. This is pretty easy if one is financially stable, money gets approval everywhere. Through its operations, Kohort helps aspiring students understand the need and scope of their higher education.  

NSRCEL as a startup incubator offers opportunities to niche down and be specific and akin to this, Kohort wishes to mentor promising individuals with the potential to transform. 

The aim and objective of Kohort is to reduce gaps in social mobility through a platform that helps aspirants tap into professional opportunities. This venture has set out to further transform its platform to meet the scope and development of the space of education in the future. Kohort’s journey at NSRCEL began through LinkedIn, where Pavan was in touch with Nagaraja Prakasam, advisor and mentor at NSRCEL. Inspired by his entrepreneurial experience and efforts in leading farming communities across South India, Pavan and Naga’s conversation set the tone for Kohort in terms of exploring new opportunities.  

From working on building a hands-on mentoring platform to conducting a pilot study with 40 people who have been awarded scholarships worth Rs 14 Crores, Kohort is now working on upscaling their first-of-a-kind Bootcamp, thus impacting close to 10,000 people by 2023. All set to scale, Kohort is now making a space for itself in the market and is giving back to society, one day at a time.  

“To be brave, be more courageous – just go for it!” says Pavan. Kohort does not want to sell the idea of education but pave the way for people to start seeing themselves evolve as professionals and invest in their growth.