Mentorship for South African students and programmes

Meet the professional who has walked your path.

MentorLab connects students and career changers with vetted mentors, books sessions inside each mentor's open hours, and holds the video call in the app. Universities, companies and incubators run it as programmes and see who met and what changed.

Find a mentor Get the app

On the web, Android and Windows. Free for mentees and mentors.

A large group of young people from the Tech Horizons community, smiling and waving outside a campus building. — The Tech Horizons community, KwaZulu-Natal

Who it is for

Free

Students and career changers

Find a mentor in your field, see their open times this week, and ask for a session with a short note on what you need.

Programmes

Universities and companies

Run graduate, student-success or internal mentoring as cohorts: import members, match mentors, and follow every pair.

Programmes

Incubators and enterprise development

Give founders a mentor at each stage, record what each session covered, and export the evidence your funders ask for.

Participants working together on laptops at a Tech Horizons event.

The career conversation not every student gets at home

Picture a first-generation student in KwaZulu-Natal, the first in her family at university. She has the marks, but nobody at home can tell her how to get a first job, the way a graduate with professional parents hears it over dinner.

On MentorLab she finds a vetted professional who has walked the path, books a time that suits them both, and meets on a call. Her sessions and chat stay readable when the signal drops.

How it works

Sign up
Create an account and agree to how your information is used.
Find a mentor
Browse vetted professionals by field and see their open times this week.
Book a session
Pick an open time and say what you need. The mentor approves, and chat opens.
Meet
Join the video call from the session, from 10 minutes before it starts.
Follow up
The mentor records what you covered, you confirm it, and you both leave feedback.

Built for trust and for patchy signal

Vetted mentors

An administrator approves every mentor before any mentee can see them, and a declined application always carries a reason.

Booking in open hours

Mentors set their weekly hours. Mentees book inside them, one request per mentor at a time, so nobody is flooded.

Video calls in the session

A private, signed call opens shortly before the session and closes after it. Chat opens only once the mentor approves.

Works when the signal drops

Sessions, chat history and the mentor list stay readable offline. Messages written offline send when the signal returns.

Session records both sign

After each session the mentor writes what was covered and the mentee confirms it. Once confirmed, the record is locked.

Engagement you can see

Attendance, requests left waiting, and mentees drifting away, so a mentor or a programme can step in early.

Run mentorship as a programme you can report on

Import a cohort of up to 500 members from a CSV, and match each mentee with a mentor.
Set the outcomes a programme works towards, and see which mentees have reached them.
See which mentees are at risk: no session in 14 days, or no confirmed session record in 30.
Export each mentee's evidence: sessions held, signed records and outcomes reached.

Mentees and mentors never pay. Organisations subscribe by the number of programmes they run.

Open the app

A full lecture hall group photo at a Tech Horizons event at a KwaZulu-Natal university.

Get MentorLab

One account works on every device. Sign in with the same email on the web, your phone or your PC.

Web

Nothing to install. Open it in Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari on a phone or a computer. The video call runs inside the page.

Open in your browser

Android

Download the APK and open it on your phone, then allow installs from your browser when Android asks. Video calls run inside the app; allow the camera and microphone when asked. Android 7.0 or newer.

Download for Android

For most phones. A phone from before about 2017 needs the armv7 version.

Windows

Download the zip, unzip it, and run mentorlab.exe. If Windows warns that the publisher is unknown, choose More info, then Run anyway. Video calls run inside the app.

Download for Windows

64-bit Windows 10 or 11.

Every file, with its size and SHA-256 checksum: the download page.

A Tech Horizons member speaking to a room at a community event.

Built by Tech Horizons

Tech Horizons is a KwaZulu-Natal tech community that runs hackathons, workshops and events for students and young innovators. MentorLab comes from that network, to give every student access to people who have done the work before them.

Visit kznth.co.za