Bengaluru-based ed-tech startup InterviewBit on Tuesday raised $20 million in a Series A round led by Sequoia India and Tiger Global.
Part of Sequoia’s early-stage accelerator, Surge, Interviewbit will use the capital to scale up enrolment and launch its product in new markets, besides improving its curriculum and live teaching product to enhance the student-teacher experience. Founded in 2015 by Abhimanyu Saxena and Anshuman Singh, the startup runs an advanced online computer science programme for college graduates and young engineering professionals.
“We are thrilled by the faith and support shown to us by our investors. A lot of young engineers don’t always have access and exposure to the relevant technical skills or recruitment processes of global companies. Our mission is to bridge that gap and help them grow in their careers. We are very pleased to be able to help young engineers expand their knowledge and coding skills and enable them to get top tier software engineers jobs at the best global tech companies,” said Singh.
The online programme, now rebranded as Scaler Academy, is a six-month intensive course to enhance the coding skills of professionals focussing on a modern curriculum with exposure to the latest technologies. The students enrolled in Scaler Academy are mentored and taught by tech leaders and subject matter experts working with leading organisations, including Google, Facebook, Twitter and Netflix.
The company claims that 2,000 students have enroled in the programme, and several hundred software engineers have already graduated and placed in top tech companies.
“Within a short period of time, it has made a huge impact on the capabilities of our students, who spend, on an average 4-5 hours per day on our online and live learning platform. We are very excited that our work results in a step function change in the careers of our students,” said Saxena.
“There is a huge global scarcity of high-quality software talent, and we have experienced it firsthand across the portfolio. As a result, we were very excited about Anshuman and Abhimanyu’s vision to build an advanced online computer science programme,” said Shailendra Singh, managing director, Sequoia Capital (India) Singapore. “We were very fortunate to work closely with them to launch Scaler Academy during Surge 01 and are thrilled with the early results. Sequoia India is excited to partner with them to help realise Scaler’s full potential”, he added.
The National Employability Report Engineers, 2019, said that the employability of Indian engineers was as low as 20%. According to the report, more than 4 million students get enrolled in engineering colleges every year, but only 3.4% are considered employable for software engineering product roles, and 1-5% are deemed employable in artificial intelligence, mobile app development (android and iOS) and web development.
Scaler Academy claims to bridge this gap by training engineers in industry-specific skills and connecting them with industry leaders.
