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AttainU, a Bangalore based edtech startup providing high-quality, live online courses as college alternative to individuals has raised angel funding from investors including Shailesh Rao ex-Google India Head, Nikhil Rungta ex-Intuit India Head, Anil Gelra – Founder, SnapMint and Manish Kumar – Founder, KredX and LetsVenture. The company plans to use the funding to further strengthen faculty, development of courses, counselling teams and build a semi-automated platform to cater to the huge inbound student demand they are receiving.
Founded by Divyam Goel and Vaibhav Bajpai in 2018, AttainU currently offers full-time, online 7-month long Software Engineering courses for users looking to get into Software Engineering careers. AttainU provides career counselling as part of their student assessment process and connects graduates to industry partners for placement upon completion of the course. AttainU aims to serve students who have a college education but don’t have a job or a satisfactory job and more importantly, don’t need to have prior coding experience. AttainU courses are focussed on industry-aligned practical skills and professionally required life skills and follow a deferred fee payment model conditional to employment aka Income Share Agreement (ISA).
AttainU team comes with rich experience in deep tech and education. Divyam has worked with Microsoft, Uber and Google and Vaibhav was a founding member at GeekforGeeks, the largest computer science interview preparation platform. Both founders come with the strong belief that education is one of the most important challenges to be solved in India.
Divyam Goel, CEO & Co-founder, AttainU, said, “For us, the goal has always been about solving higher education in a systematic, scalable way. From the beginning, we have had a very strong focus on maintaining our high-quality learning outcomes as we scale. Over the last 10 months, we have been able to figure out many processes, complementing human psychology, to facilitate deep-rooted learning. At this point, we are receiving double-digit thousand student applications every month and are very excited about the scale of impact we will be able to deliver through our tech-first approach.”
Commenting on the angel round, Nikhil Rungta, ex Intuit India MD, said, “Over 60% of the engineering students who pass out every year are either unemployed or are stuck in unrelated jobs. If we go beyond engineers, this problem multiplies 10 times. I feel, the team at AttainU has identified this huge unsolved problem and are trying to solve it in a tech-first, structured and scalable way. Divyam and Vaibhav have been able to put together a good team which not only has domain expertise but is also passionate about solving this huge problem. A good proof of demand is that they have secured in-principle hiring commitments from some very well known startups like Delhivery, Grofers, 1mg, Housing and MakeMyTrip. Overall, AttainU has the potential to be one of the biggest players in the area of industry-ready skill development and employment generation.”
The overall post-college skilling market in India was pegged at $370 million this year and the market for post-college tech skilling in India stands at $180 million in 2019, growing at almost 50% annually. Every year approximately 9 million students graduate from colleges, out of which 85% don’t make it to well paying, white collar jobs. Data states that 50% of all BE/B.Tech graduates and 60% of all MBA(including PG Diploma) graduates are still considered not employable by tech first organisations.