FutureLab

Global mentoring platform connecting individuals and organisations with expert mentors across Southeast Asia

Brian Tan graduated with a biochemistry degree and decided he wanted to work in management consulting. He failed his first interview because he was unprepared in ways that a better-connected peer — someone with a mentor in the industry — would not have been. That asymmetry of access became FutureLab.

The problem: mentorship is the most effective professional development tool that isn't available to everyone

Ask any successful professional to trace the inflection points in their career, and the answer almost always includes a person — a manager who believed in them early, a senior colleague who explained how things actually worked, an entrepreneur who gave candid advice before a critical decision. Mentorship is how tacit knowledge — the kind that doesn't appear in any syllabus — gets transmitted from experienced practitioners to the people coming up behind them.

The problem is that access to this form of guidance has always been structurally unequal. If you grew up in a well-connected family, attended a well-networked university, or were lucky enough to work at a company that invested in formal development programmes, your chances of finding a mentor were reasonable. If you didn't — if you were a first-generation graduate from a regional university, or a mid-career professional trying to change industries in a market without strong professional associations — the pathway to that guidance was unclear or simply absent. The quality of mentorship available to you was a function of the network you were born into, not the quality of your questions.

EdTech has done significant work on the knowledge layer of this problem — online courses, skill platforms, and content libraries have made formal learning more accessible than at any prior point in history. But the guidance layer, the part where an experienced human looks at your specific situation and tells you what to do next, has been much harder to scale. FutureLab is the infrastructure for that layer.

The product: mentoring infrastructure for individuals and organisations

FutureLab operates across two distinct but reinforcing models. The individual-facing platform connects students, graduates, young professionals, and aspiring entrepreneurs with a network of over 4,000 mentors across Southeast Asia — accessible by booking virtual sessions, with transparent mentor profiles, ratings, and reviews that allow mentees to find the right fit rather than relying on cold introductions. The social enterprise dimension is embedded from the start: mentors can choose to donate session fees to education charities, creating a giving mechanism that has helped sustain mentor supply without purely mercenary incentives.

The B2B platform — which came about through a 2017 chance approach from Lean In, who wanted to use FutureLab's technology without the public marketplace — is now the more commercially significant segment. FutureLab provides organisations with white-label mentoring infrastructure: a configurable platform that enables corporations to run internal mentoring programmes, universities to activate alumni-to-student mentoring networks, startup accelerators to connect founders with expert advisors, and government bodies to deliver structured professional development at scale. The software handles matching logic, session scheduling, progress tracking, and analytics — the operational overhead that makes mentoring programmes fail when run through spreadsheets and email.

This dual model is strategically coherent. The public marketplace builds the mentor supply and validates the matching quality. The B2B platform monetises that supply at enterprise contract values. Each reinforces the other: organisations that use FutureLab's platform are hiring from a marketplace that has already vetted and rated its mentors. The network effect runs in both directions.

Enterprise traction: a client roster that validates the B2B thesis

The organisations that have adopted FutureLab's platform span the exact verticals the original investment thesis identified as the highest-value use cases. MDEC and MaGIC represent the government-backed digital economy development mandate — using FutureLab to connect talent to industry at scale. The British Council, Accenture, and the United Nations reflect enterprise and institutional adoption from credible, sophisticated buyers with mature L&D functions. Sunway University and Taylor's University represent the university alumni activation model — giving institutions the infrastructure to do what the world's best universities have always done: turn their alumni network into a living asset for current students.

The startup ecosystem vertical is equally well-validated. FutureLab has run mentor programmes for accelerators and VCs who want to amplify the value of their expert networks — providing a structured platform for what often happens informally and inconsistently. The Sarawak Digital Economy Corporation has used it to deploy mentoring programmes across the state's startup ecosystem, demonstrating that the platform works not just in KL's concentrated tech ecosystem but in regional markets where the gap between founders and expertise is even larger.

The founder: a management consultant who taught himself to code to build what he needed

Brian Tan's trajectory is specific and credible. He graduated with a biochemistry degree from the University of Bath, completed an MSc in Management at Imperial College Business School, and joined Accenture as a management consulting analyst working on digital strategy for telecoms clients. He later moved to Ethos & Company, a boutique strategy firm, before leaving to build FutureLab full-time. In 2016, he enrolled in a full-stack developer bootcamp at NEXT Academy — not to become an engineer, but to have enough technical grounding to make informed product decisions and to reduce dependence on external developers at the critical early stage.

He co-founded FutureLab with two childhood friends, Clarissa and Fung Wei, after a series of industry meet-and-greet events they ran to test the concept. When two students they connected with mentors landed jobs at a Kuala Lumpur law firm directly from those sessions, they had enough proof of concept to apply for funding from Cradle. The approach — test with real events before building software, validate the outcome before scaling the model — reflects a kind of pragmatic discipline that is not universal among early-stage founders. Brian has been public about his belief in building toward profitability before raising, which aligns directly with our capital-efficient investment philosophy at Indelible.

The HolonIQ Top 50 SEA EdTech recognition — awarded in 2020, 2021, 2023, and 2024 — is the kind of consistent external validation that reflects sustained execution quality rather than a single good year. It places FutureLab in the company of the region's most consequential EdTech businesses, which is the right context for understanding the scale of what Brian and the team are building.

What would have to be true for this not to work

The honest challenges are real. Mentoring marketplaces are difficult to scale because quality is inherently variable and the matching problem is genuinely hard — a mentor who is excellent for one mentee's specific situation may be mediocre for another's. FutureLab's rating and review system helps with this, but managing supply quality across a 4,000-mentor network at scale requires sustained operational discipline. The B2B product insulates against this somewhat, since enterprise clients are matching within a defined internal community rather than across the full open marketplace.

The B2B sales cycle is also a real consideration. Universities, government bodies, and large corporations are not fast buyers. The pipeline has been built through demonstrated value — word of mouth from initial clients — which is a durable but slow-compounding distribution model. The pre-A round enables the commercial team expansion that should accelerate this cycle.

What tips the balance: FutureLab has built something that is simultaneously a genuine commercial platform and a genuine social good. The mission to make mentorship accessible to people who don't have it through birth and circumstance is not a marketing frame — it's the reason Brian left consulting to build this. That kind of founder-mission alignment creates a resilience and staying power that is difficult to sustain in a purely commercial venture. We invest in businesses that generate returns. We are also pleased when those businesses make the world materially better. FutureLab does both.