Pocket Mentor

Who are you and what is Pocket Mentor?

We’re Daniel Pratt and Matt Spangher, the founders of Pocket Mentor. We have spent years coaching elite athletes and leading teams and wanted to make that calibre of guidance useful outside professional sport.

Pocket Mentor is an AI-powered personal mentor. It gives people a private place to talk through a challenge, improve their thinking and turn a difficult moment into a practical next step.

What did elite coaching teach you about mentorship?

The best mentoring is personal, timely and grounded in the situation in front of you. A useful question at the right moment can change how someone responds. The difficulty is that experienced mentors have limited time and traditional one-to-one support is hard to scale.

Through our coaching and mentoring work, we saw demand from people who wanted support between sessions or could not access a senior mentor at all. That made us ask whether technology could extend the reach of the principles we had used for years.

How did the idea become an AI product?

We moved from a traditional mentoring concept to an AI-first experience that people can access whenever they need it. Pocket Mentor is designed to listen, ask useful questions and help someone arrive at their own clear action.

The product combines our performance and coaching experience with the work of a broader team. CEO Kim Keedle brings high-performance coaching experience from Formula 1 and CTO Craig Sheen leads the technology.

Where is Pocket Mentor today?

Pocket Mentor is live on Apple and Google Play and has supported more than 1,500 conversations. The company has raised close to A$400,000 across two investment rounds.

Our founding group includes AFL premiership coaching and playing experience, alongside Kim’s work around Oscar Piastri and McLaren. That background gives the product a strong foundation, though the real test is whether each conversation helps the person using it. We are continuing to learn from those conversations and make high-quality mentorship more available in everyday life.