CareerNinja an AI-driven ed-tech platform has raised a pre-seed round of funding from Unitus Ventures.
CareerNinja democratises quality learning at affordable rates for anyone seeking to upskill that provides personalised and experiential courses to users based on their goals and skill level.
Learners on the platform also get one-on-one mentorship with industry experts, opportunities to work on guided projects, personalised doubt solving, a dedicated student success manager and guaranteed placement.
Some of CareerNinja’s learners have been placed in leading companies such as GroupM, Target, 3M and WhiteHat Jr.
Founded by Shronit Ladhani in 2017, CareerNinja is focused on making high-quality learning both practical and affordable in India.
“The outcome-focused approach at CareerNinja simply follows Newton’s third law of motion: for every bit of effort our learners put in, we exert an equal effort to provide them with holistic upskilling, mentorship and assured placement.
With about 35 million students in colleges right now, India’s employable workforce is the size of a small country. Industrial revolution 4.0 will give birth to smart factories and a digitized new normal, where traditional skillsets will become obsolete.
The World Economic Forum predicts the need to reskill more than 1 billion people by 2030. CareerNinja seamlessly addresses the quality upskilling needs of those early in their career and looking to upgrade their career profiles.
The company uses ML (machine learning) and NLP (natural language processing) models and frameworks to make learning more personalized and interactive while bringing down the cost,” said Shronit Ladhani, Founder, CareerNinja.
He further added that forty-three percent of businesses surveyed indicate that they are set to reduce their workforce due to technology integration, 41 percent plan to expand their use of contractors for task-specialized work, and 34 percent plan to expand their workforce due to technology integration.
This is where CareerNinja is creating an impact. We aim to touch over a million learners by 2022. The funding secured will help us to advance the product, team and technology to achieve this goal.
A nation-wide employability report showed that graduating students had only a 20 percent employability in today’s knowledge economy. Forty-eight percent of Indian employers report difficulties filling job vacancies due to talent shortages.
A serial investor in job-tech companies, Unitus Ventures believes that the Indian economy will need to generate tens of millions of meaningful jobs for its burgeoning young population, the so-called demographic dividend.
It will also need to provide the workforce opportunities to upskill themselves as technology continues to disrupt the nature of work at an ever-increasing pace.
“Business needs are changing rapidly and hiring needs are constantly evolving to keep up. The roots of underemployment in our country are deep. One way to address this is to make upskilling affordable and outcome-focused for the millions in India’s workforce.
CareerNinja aligns with our outlook and investment thesis to create meaningful solutions to address this problem at scale,” said Surya Mantha, Senior Partner, Unitus Ventures.
