Indian edtech startup helps students get jobs at Amazon, Facebook or Google

Indian job-preparation startup InterviewBit is planning to expand to Singapore and Southeast Asia, co-founder Abhimanyu Saxena tells Tech in Asia.

“Fixing higher education has been the highest priority for governments in Southeast Asia,” Saxena says. “The Singaporean government has taken a lot of steps to work in this direction.”

Founded in 2015, InterviewBit wants to use the US$20 million it raised in late January to do that. Led by Sequoia India and Tiger Global, the series A round helped value the five year-old company at about US$100 million, a person familiar with the company’s thinking tells Tech in Asia.

InterviewBit founders Anshuman Singh and Abhimanyu Saxena / Photo credit: InterviewBit

InterviewBit is a part of Surge 01, a rapid scale-up program for startups in India and Southeast Asia run by Sequoia India.

Venture capital firms have stepped up funding for India’s thriving education technology industry in recent months. Demand for online education in the country is expected to rise to about US$2 billion in 2021 from US$247 million in 2016, says a May 2017 report by KPMG and Google. That projection is for a country that produces about 1.5 million engineers a year, according to an official at the country’s education regulator. But out of the 170,000 engineering students sampled across more than 750 colleges across India, only 3.7% were found to be employable at startups, reported talent evaluator Aspiring Minds.

Other homegrown e-learning platforms are also joining the edtech funding boom. Last week, Vedantu raised US$24 million in a series C funding round led by GGV Capital, while Info Edge India invested about US$5.19 million in Sunrise Mentors, which operates programming-focused platform Coding Ninjas. Byju’s recent funding valued India’s only profitable unicorn at about US$8.2 billion. In January, Doubtnut raised US$15 million in series A funding led by Tencent.

Playing matchmaker

InterviewBit works with over 600 firms, including US firms Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Uber as well as India-based companies Dunzo, Flipkart, and Myntra to hire engineers.

“Any company would have limited bandwidth to evaluate people,” says Saxena.

InterviewBit reviews applicants’ resumes and recommends potential hires to big technology companies. “We are planning to move to a very affordable hiring plan for the companies,” says Saxena.

The startup offers potential hires three payment options for its programming course: an upfront fee; a fee that promises to return candidates’ money if they don’t get a job in a year; and a commission equivalent to 12% to 15% of a successful candidate’s base pay for two years if they get a US$56,000 plus annual salary.

At their previous jobs, he and co-founder Anshuman Singh realized there was a mismatch between what recruiters seek and what candidates can offer. Saxena explains that the gap stems from the inability of legacy education to catch up with industry demands.

“We would interview about 80 to 100 people before making a job offer,” he shares. “We train candidates on what the industry requires. Even getting an interview at Google isn’t easily possible.”

Getting ready for the big leagues

InterviewBit also runs an advanced six-month online computer science program for college graduates and software engineers.

Scarcity of talent