10KC

10KC: Mentoring and Connectivity for Decentralized Teams

10KC (Ten Thousand Coffees) is a talent experience platform offering mentoring, employee connectivity, and skills development solutions built for hybrid and remote work. The company was formed in 2014 in Toronto and was originally bootstrapped, taking its first institutional investment only in October 2022: a $56 million round from Five Elms Capital, a Kansas City-based venture firm (PRNewswire; Startland News, 2026). Dave Wilkin serves as CEO and co-founder, with Elliott Garcea as co-founder and CTO. Wilkin, who has described himself as an LGBT+ entrepreneur who grew up in a small rural town, has said his own experience of how critical mentors and connections were to opportunity and belonging directly shaped why he built 10KC (Benzinga, 2022).

What 10KC does

10KC's platform uses six proprietary solutions to help organizations build, manage, and measure an employee's experience across the talent lifecycle, spanning onboarding, mentoring, diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, early talent programs, and leadership development, with a particular focus on maintaining human connection in remote and decentralized work environments (PRNewswire, 2022). A core capability is managing and measuring cohort-based corporate mentorship programs specifically designed to support engagement, development, internal mobility, and retention (Crunchbase, 2026).

Where it fits

10KC serves more than 200 organizations, including corporate clients and social impact organizations, and has partnered with groups like the Black Professionals in Tech Network to expand mentoring access for Black professionals specifically (Crunchbase; LeadIQ, 2026). It's a fit for organizations, particularly those with hybrid or fully distributed teams, that want structured, measurable mentoring and connectivity programs rather than relying on informal, organic networking that tends to favor employees who are already well-connected.

Why this matters for people leaders

Informal mentoring and networking have always tended to favor people who are already well-connected, often reinforcing existing advantage rather than distributing opportunity more broadly, and that gap widens further in hybrid and remote settings where hallway conversations simply don't happen. 10KC's structured, measurable approach to mentoring is a direct response to that dynamic: making connection and access something the organization actively builds and tracks, rather than something that happens by chance for whoever's already in the room. For organizations focused on Culture, Performance, and Retention, that's a meaningful distinction, because employees who lack access to mentors and internal networks are measurably more likely to feel disconnected and eventually leave.

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