A Bangalore based edtech startup, AttainU has secured 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 providing high-quality, live online courses as college alternative to individuals, plans to use the raised amount to strengthen faculty, development of courses, counseling teams. Also, to build a semi-automated platform to cater to the huge inbound student demand they are receiving. 

Speaking on the development, 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. Overall, AttainU has the potential to be one of the biggest players in the area of industry-ready skill development and employment generationÂ

AttainU: What it caters to?

Founded in 2018 by Divyam Goel and Vaibhav Bajpai, AttainU currently offers full-time, online 7 month-long Software Engineering courses for users looking to get into Software Engineering careers. 

ÂDivyam 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,” said Rungta.

AttainU provides career counseling as part of their student assessment process and connects graduates to industry partners for placement upon completion of the course. The company aims to serve students who have a college education but donÂt have a job or a satisfactory job and more importantly, don’t need to have prior coding experience. The courses provided by the startup are focused on industry-aligned practical skills and professionally required life skills. It follows a deferred fee payment model conditional to employment aka Income Share Agreement (ISA). 

The brain behind the startup

AttainU team comes with rich experience in deep tech and education. Divyam has worked with Microsoft, Uber and Google. While 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. 

“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,” said Divyam Goel, CEO & Co-founder, AttainU. 

Market AttainU tapping

The overall post-college skilling market in India was pegged at USD $370 million this year and the market for post-college tech skilling in India stands at USD $180 million in 2019, growing at almost 50% annually. Every year approximately 9 million students graduate from colleges, out of which 85% donÂt 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 organizations.