Portfolio Spotlight 🔦 Kintell

Jane Qiu, Co-Founder of Kintell

Kintell is a video-based insight sharing platform, created by two PhDs who wanted to give professionals greater access to information from experts around the world. Born from a thirst for knowledge and sharing it with the world, Kintell stands for ‘kind intelligence’ has grown into a video engagement tech company specialising in content, comms, connect, and caring.

We sat down with Jane Qiu, co-founder of Kintell, to chat about the problem their startup set out to solve and how Kintell has grown from strength to strength. 

When Jane Qiu was an MBA educator, she noticed a knowledge gap that she was desperate to fill for her students. While she held deep knowledge in her field, there were topics that needed different levels of expertise, and it was often time consuming and arduous to find the right people who had the time to connect with her students. Her co-founder, James Behzadi, also faced the same problem but inside the corporate world for professionals.

“A lot of the things they need to learn is actually from each other, especially from alumni in different industries,” Qiu said, “I have limited knowledge to provide to them as one person. They actually need to talk to tens of people especially when they want to change career or change industry. I need to find people in those industries for them to talk to.” 

Jane and her co-founder asked themselves this question: 

“How about we solve this by building a platform to let people find each other and connect with each other into a live session so that they can ask advice without me facilitating or trying to find people manually and then email back and forth to get to a chat? So we started to build a platform.”  

That’s when they came up with the idea of Kintell – a knowledge sharing video platform that can connect people from around the world to share their expertise and learn together, in a peer-to-peer environment, at the click of a button.  

Describing their MVP, Qiu shared how important it was to build their own platform so they could manage the user experience, end-to-end.  

“We started as an insight marketplace, or one-to-one, because that has the lowest technical requirement, and we built our own video platform. We built our own scheduling. We want excellent user experience, that's why we decided to build our own so we can integrate everything.” 

Kintell has since grown with the vision and mission of making knowledge and wisdom accessible to everyone. Moving on from being a marketplace, Kintell is now a fully-fledged video-engagement tech company that facilitates impactful content across the globe.

“With cost-effective professional-grade video production, Kintell empowers organisations to quickly create impactful content from their members worldwide. Additionally, our all-in-one virtual coaching and mentoring solutions foster meaningful and on-demand connections for insight sharing within networks. Kintell is all about facilitating seamless video-based engagement, enabling organisations to connect their members and captivate their audience with a modern turn-key solution.”

Operating by what they call the “4Cs: content, comms, connect, and caring”, the name Kintell speaks to the core of what the startup is about – kind intelligence. The ethos of the company is to share knowledge for the greater good, and leading with kindness is a value that continues to be at the forefront of everything the startup does.  

Amongst the projects that Kintell is involved in, their platform facilitates a language program for Ukraine, Language Connect for Ukraine, “addressing the need for Ukrainians around the world to learn new languages to integrate into new communities” after displacement from the recent war. On the formal education front, Kintell has also facilitated a UNSW Alumni connection platform, Alumni Connect, an innovative way for alumni to connect with each other to share their learnings and expand their careers and skillsets through shared knowledge long after graduation day.  

Kintell was a part of the UNSW Founders 10x Accelerator Program in 2019, and Jane speaks highly of their experience in the cohort, and their ongoing connection to the Founders team.  

“It's nice that you have a home, you know? Like you have your fellow founders, you have a place you trust and a place you feel warm that you go to, because [being] founders, a lot of time, it’s not just the work, it's also mental health.” 

“I'm grateful for the Founders and it just feels like home. It's like a family to us and it's a pretty great place.” 

The startup is now branching out into conferences, content creation, education institutions, and more. As Kintell looks toward the future, their ethos of kind intelligence remains front and centre as they continue to grow and scale and make video learning accessible for all.  

To find out more about Kintell and how you can get involved, visit https://kintell.com/