The expert traveler and nature writer Mark Jenkins once wrote, “Maps are essential. Planning a journey without a map is like building a house without drawings.”
Embra, a Little Rock-based technology company, is looking to give law students a map to their journey through school and into successful and fulfilling careers, while also prioritizing their mental health.
Entrepreneur Adrian Bond was struck with the idea to help students in law school after observing his wife, Brittney, and their friends struggling with life as law students.
“She felt lost the entire time,” Bond said. “[Law school] was already hard, but it’s even harder when you don’t know what’s next.”
He couldn’t get the idea out of his head and jumped full force into software development, despite having little experience in the technology field. He spent late nights teaching himself how to code by using AI and was able to create a decent demo model.
Luckily, he connected with a talented developer who has programmed a more user-friendly and better-looking beta version, equipped with tools that Bond’s research identified students needed.
Bond and his wife sent out surveys to law students to collect feedback and identify issues they were encountering in school. The responses helped the Embra team learn what features the platform should include.
“We’ve done the research; we’ve been building it with the students,” Bond said. “By the time law students see it, they will feel like it was made by them.”
With the daily mood tracker, students can keep track of how they feel and reset before they burn out. There are also many growth tools that help users plan and mark their semester milestones, deadlines and test prep.
As people join the Embra platform, its community will grow, and law students will one day be able to connect with those already in the business. Professionals around the country will be encouraged to join as mentors and meet with students throughout their law school career. Bond envisions this being beneficial by opening doors for students to find jobs at firms outside of the state they went to school in, as well as connecting small and medium-sized law companies with more applicants.
Along the journey, the Embra team has also been given their own tools and support to help show them the way to build a successful company, though the process has still been full of challenges and speed bumps.
Embra applied and was accepted into NVIDIA’s Inception Program. NVIDIA is a global artificial intelligence computing company, and the inception program provides free, professional support to startup technology companies, helping them hone their AI tools, build new technologies and grow their businesses. Another similar opportunity housed in Little Rock is Spark!, a pre-accelerator program for central Arkansas small businesses. The 10 weekly sessions connect an exclusive cohort of early-stage entrepreneurs with tools and mentors to build a solid foundation for their companies.
Bond said Spark! helped his team “sharpen who Embra is and what problem we’re truly solving.”
“The mentors pushed us to think more clearly about our positioning, our users, and how to build something that actually works in the real world, not just on paper,” he said.
The program, which was co-founded by The Venture Center and the Little Rock Regional Chamber, caps off the annual program with a showcase, where each business has a chance to pitch itself publicly to the audience.
This year, the showcase took place on Tuesday, Dec. 9, and Bond said it was a great opportunity to share Embra with the community and gather public feedback.
“We received strong interest and thoughtful questions from attendees, which reinforced that the challenges we’re addressing around student wellness, clarity and support are very real and widely felt,” he said.
The Embra team is currently operating in a private beta stage and has early access waitlists available on its website for interested students, partners and advisors.
“We’re currently finalizing the platform and onboarding flow to ensure students have a strong experience when access opens more broadly after winter break,” Bond said.
Meanwhile, the team is also working on securing pilot partnership programs with a few law schools and will then expand access from there. Bond’s long-term vision is to have universities’ learning management systems be created and powered by Embra, utilizing the Embra tools, such as the mood tracker, milestone trackers and more. Right now, many universities use Blackboard or Canvas as their learning management system, which Bond said are not built with the student in mind.
“I want [students] to trust us and know that everything we’re doing is in their best interest,” he said.
These schools with Embra-powered systems will also have access to information about their students’ well-being, and prospective students will know which schools have the happiest students based on the moods Embra tracks. All of this will put a larger emphasis on student mental health than there currently is, especially in law school.
Embra’s flame may just be beginning to grow, but Bond has plans for it to set the industry ablaze someday.
“We’re young and hungry,” he said. “We’re very passionate, and we’re going to make it.”
Follow Embra’s social media for continued updates on the platform’s progress.
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