Teen Founder Yukti Dahiya Mentors 500+ Students, Incubates 75 Women-Led Ventures

A Class 12 student has mentored more than 500 learners and incubated over 75 women-led ventures — all before finishing school.

Yukti Dahiya, a student at Amity International School, Pushp Vihar in New Delhi, founded Project Pathways in 2024 to deliver career counselling and mentorship to students in underserved areas. In early 2025 she added a second venture, RISE (Rural Incubation & Startup Enablement), built to help women in rural communities turn business ideas into viable enterprises.

The numbers move fast from there. RISE has trained more than 1,000 aspiring entrepreneurs and assembled a network of more than 100 mentors — business founders, investors, chartered accountants, lawyers and industry professionals — according to information provided about the initiative.

What does Project Pathways actually do?

The initiative targets students who lack access to career counselling, mentorship and reliable information about educational and professional opportunities. It runs workshops, counselling sessions, mentorship and skills development programmes across schools and coaching institutes.

The goal is practical: help students identify their strengths and understand different career pathways. To date, Project Pathways has mentored more than 500 students, according to the initiative's own figures.

In plain words: a teenager built a career-guidance pipeline that has already reached half a thousand students.

How does RISE support women entrepreneurs?

RISE operates a three-phase programme that combines entrepreneurship education, mentorship, seed funding and access to potential investors.

The initiative backs participating entrepreneurs through:

• Demo Days to pitch ventures
• Seed microgrants
• Guidance on branding, e-commerce, digital payments and retail partnerships

The tally, per information provided: 1,000+ entrepreneurs trained, 75+ women-led ventures incubated, 100+ mentors in the network.

A third initiative — and an academic record to match

Dahiya also leads ArthEdge, a youth-led financial literacy initiative that uses interactive learning, entrepreneurship activities and community outreach to widen access to practical financial knowledge.

Her academic credentials stack up. She has undertaken research under the mentorship of professors associated with the Indian School of Business and Harvard University, focusing on educational inequality, financial literacy and decision-making.

Her competition record includes:

• All India Rank 6 at the International Economics Olympiad
• National Rank 3 at the National Economics Olympiad
• The AMC Honor Roll in mathematics, placing her among the top five per cent worldwide
• The Gold Award at the Queen's Commonwealth Essay Competition

She was also nominated for the Pradhan Mantri Rashtriya Bal Puraskar and received the National Humanitarian Excellence Award, according to the information provided.

Why the model matters

Taken together, Project Pathways, RISE and ArthEdge attack the same bottleneck from three angles: access to information, mentorship and capital — for students and aspiring entrepreneurs in underserved communities.

The structure is the interesting part. Career counselling, seed microgrants and financial literacy training rarely sit under one roof, let alone one run by a secondary school student. With 500 mentees, 75 incubated ventures and a 100-strong mentor network already on the board, Dahiya's three-initiative model offers a template that other student founders — and the schools that back them — may soon copy.