Bangalore-based AttainU, an online platform offering live tuition courses, has won an angel investment funding round led by several of India’s leading tech lights.
The backers include ex-Google India chief Shailesh Rao, SnapMint founder Anil Gelra and Nikhil Rungta, the former head of Intuit India. They see in AttainU a chance to corner a domestic post-college tuition market worth around $370 million—and a global e-learning set to be worth almost $2bn by 2021.
AttainU, founded last year by Divyam Goel and Vaibhav Bajpai, aims to plug an Indian education bottleneck, through which 80% of its 24m college-enrolled students fail to get a job after completing their studies. Its seven-month-long software engineering courses are free upfront, with payment only occurring upon admission to a role worth 500,000 Indian rupees, or $7,000, per year.
“Over 60% of the engineering students who pass out every year are either unemployed or are stuck in unrelated jobs,” wrote Rungta, the ex-Intuit head. “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.”