College is supposed to be a life-defining experience–but that doesn’t mean students always graduate with all the skills they need to build their lives. Paragon One, an online career coaching service and mentor marketplace, wants to fill in the gaps. The startup announced that it has raised $1.9 million in seed funding from Y Combinator, Foundation Capital, Learn Capital, University Ventures, Li Yuan Ventures, Altair Ventures, Jimmy Lai, the CFO of online English school 51Talk, and former Tencent CTO Jeff Xiong.
Paragon One, which took part in Y Combinator’s last batch of startups, takes sign ups from around the world, but one of its biggest markets is Chinese college students who want to work abroad. The site differentiates from other career coaching services with a recommendation engine that pairs students with mentors based on their backgrounds and personalities . That tech is key to Paragon One’s ability to grow and its seed funding will be put toward product development to make the system more scalable so it can handle more students.
The company was founded in 2015 by CEO Matt Wilkerson and CTO Byron Hsu, who met 15 years ago while studying engineering at MIT. They came up with the idea for Paragon One when a mutual friend who owned a test prep school in Shanghai started referring students to them for career advice.
“They were clueless about basic resume writing, how to interview, and it was really obvious to us that colleges and universities were doing nothing for them,” says Wilkerson. “I remembered back to college, that even though we went to a great school, we knew that we were completely lost by the time we graduated.”
During job interviews after graduation, Wilkerson realized he had a hard time nailing down…