Futurely

Futurely, established in 2019, operates as a digital career counseling platform with a mission to assist young individuals in making informed academic and career choices. The company was co-founded by CEO Elisa Piscitelli and CTO Pramod Chintapenta. Piscitelli's background includes studies at MIT in Business Analytics and work at McKinsey, which inspired her to help young people with self-discovery. Chintapenta, who previously led international paid marketing at Amazon, was motivated by his own difficulties in choosing a university to guide students in discovering their passions through structured self-exploration.

The firm is headquartered in Milan, Italy, with a presence in San Francisco, and targets its services to young people, parents, schools, and companies. Futurely's business model is primarily B2B and operates as a marketplace, offering its digital guidance programs as a corporate welfare benefit. This approach aims to support employees and their children, thereby enhancing employee retention and corporate social responsibility. The company also partners with educational institutions to help them engage prospective students and increase enrollment by offering a white-label, branded version of its guidance path.

The core of Futurely's offering is a SaaS-based platform that provides a structured, digital orientation program. This program includes digital career counseling, scholarship discovery, and study planning. It connects users with a network of mentors and experts for guidance. The platform is designed to be accessible asynchronously, allowing users to engage with the material at their own pace. For corporate clients, the service is positioned as a meaningful welfare benefit that supports the families of their employees. For educational institutions, it serves as a tool to capture detailed data on prospective students' interests, helping to guide them toward suitable courses of study.

Since its inception, Futurely has secured $1.5 million in a seed funding round on September 28, 2021. The round was led by investors including Diego Piacentini, Riccardo Zacconi, and Fabio Mondini, with participation from institutional investors like View Different and Angels4Women. Keywords: career counseling, EdTech, digital guidance, student orientation, university discovery, corporate welfare, SaaS, mentor network, employee benefits, education partnerships