Our story
About Belong
Most people learn the unwritten rules of a new place by accident. We wanted to make that less random.
What is Belong?
Belong started because moving somewhere new, a city, a school, a job, is rarely hard because of the actual skills involved. It's hard because nobody hands you the unwritten rules: who to ask when you're stuck, what's okay to say out loud, how decisions really get made versus how they look on a calendar.
Usually you just find these things out the hard way, or someone happens to explain them early. We wanted that kind of guidance to exist on purpose instead of by luck.
Vision
Help people practice fitting into a new place before they're already in the deep end of it.
Values
We believe belonging shouldn't be a matter of luck, and that everyone deserves the chance to feel at home in the places and situations that matter to them, whatever background, language, or circumstance they arrive with. We keep people, not just algorithms, accountable for the guidance we give, because judgment about someone's culture and context is too important to hand off entirely to a model. We treat every learner's starting point as legitimate rather than a deficit to fix, and we'd rather be honest about what the platform can and can't do than overpromise to close a sale.
The Team behind Belong
Roshni Kurup
Founder
Roshni is deeply interested in the intersection of culture, place and design and its effect on the human experience. Having lived and worked in India, Singapore, Bali and the United States, she experienced first hand the complexities and subtleties of adapting to new social norms. Belong originated from the insight that there can be a scalable approach that leverages technology to help people with social and cultural adaptation.
Previously, she co-founded The Hue Story, an experiential design and destination events company that operates in S.E Asia and N. America. Her work has been featured in Vogue, AD and the Vogue Wedding Book. She also co-founded Tranquebar, a studio for editorial photography and film for hospitality and artisanal brands. Earlier, she worked with early stage startups in a venture incubator, in management consulting with a global consulting firm and in strategy with a healthcare access organization.
Belong is built by a small team who care about getting the details of social and cultural adaptation right, working closely with the researchers and practitioners who keep our guidance grounded in real practice. If this is a problem you'd want to work on, we're hiring.
Belong is based in Palo Alto, California.