Unstop is building India’s largest early-talent hiring engine

Across campuses, millions of students begin their studies without a clear sense of which careers to pursue or how to build the right skills. Even as India’s talent economy grows, early-career candidates still struggle to find quality opportunities. New Delhi–based Unstop.ai aims to bridge this gap with an AI-powered platform that helps young talent discover meaningful opportunities while enabling employers to hire more efficiently and at scale.

“On Day One of any UG or PG programme, everyone is clueless about what they want to do and how to build their resume,” says Ankit Aggarwal, Founder and CEO of Unstop.ai. “We want to make students and early talent with zero to three years of experience unstoppable.”

Aggarwal studied at a Tier II engineering college and later did his MBA from IMT Ghaziabad. After working across fintech, consulting, and education at companies like Sapient Consulting, Deloitte, Teach For India, and Crownit, he realised during his MBA that finding opportunities beyond campus placements was hard.

To help others facing the same problem, he started a simple blog to share opportunities. “If I get to know something, I’ll put it on my blog so anyone can see it,” he says. What began as a blog became a platform, first as a sole proprietorship in 2017 and later, in May 2019, as a formally incorporated entity.

Between 2019 and 2022, the platform functioned as a listings site for internships, competitions, and engagements. The major pivot was in May 2023, when Aggarwal rebuilt the entire product into a full-stack hiring engine powered by AI.

What Unstop.ai solves

The platform focuses on early talent, a segment Aggarwal claimed has long been underserved. Students can discover internships, jobs, hackathons, case challenges, competitions, mentorship sessions, and résumé-building resources, free of cost.

“We are India’s largest talent community with 28 million users. We aim to help them gain résumé points and land their first or second job,” he says.

For employers, Unstop.ai brings the entire hiring process into one place. The platform manages registrations, runs assessments and coding tests, conducts AI-proctored exams, takes interviews, tracks scores automatically, and monitors everything through built-in dashboards and analytics, all on a single platform.

Aggarwal says, “Earlier, employers listed jobs on our platform but conducted assessments and interviews somewhere else. After 2022, they can do everything end-to-end on Unstop.”

Unstop.ai today serves 28 million student users and early professionals and works with more than 150 enterprise customers, including conglomerates and tech giants such as Tata, Reliance Industries, Flipkart, Amazon, Accenture, Meesho, Google, HUL, Adobe, Walmart, and TCS.

The platform also powers large-scale hiring initiatives. For Walmart’s all-India women coding challenge, the company onboarded more than one lakh female coders and facilitated assessments and interviews on the platform. Flipkart used it to attract over five lakh engineering applicants.

How the technology works

Unstop.ai operates from its New Delhi headquarters, with sales offices in Mumbai and Bengaluru. It is built entirely in-house by a 140-member team, with over 40% focused on technology. The platform uses AI across its system, from assessments and mock interviews to Aadhaar-verified registrations, violation checks during tests, and automated scoring and evaluation.

“We are using all available LLM models, training them for our use cases, reinventing where required,” he says. “We call ourselves your AI talent engine.”

The approach also extends to community engagement: students participate in internal college events, festivals, hackathons, and competitions hosted on the platform, driving organic growth. This has helped Unstop.ai grow from 500,000 users in 2022 to 28 million today.

Business model and revenue

Unstop.ai follows a B2B SaaS model. Enterprises pay annual subscriptions based on their hiring volume, or opt for a pay-per-candidate model.

“Our average ticket size this year is more than Rs 20 lakh per enterprise customer,” Aggarwal says. Several clients contribute over Rs 1 crore annually, but for users, access is completely free.

The company raised $5 million in funding in September 2023, its only round so far. It remains operationally disciplined. “This year, we are profitable month on month. In FY25, we did around Rs 30 crore. This year we will cross Rs 50 crore,” he says. 

Market and the competition

Unstop.ai positions itself as a category creator focused solely on the early-talent segment. It competes with platforms such as Naukri, LinkedIn, and Indeed, but differentiates itself by offering end-to-end hiring workflows and a community-first approach.

“We want to be so big that LinkedIn starts saying they are the Unstop of working professionals,” Aggarwal says.

Unstop.ai’s early challenges were getting both students and employers to trust a new platform. It had to build a large user base from scratch and convince companies to shift from multiple tools to one system. The team slowly overcame these hurdles by improving the product and working closely with colleges and employers.

Growth plans and what’s next

The next phase focuses on scaling, global expansion, and deeper AI automation. “How can we grow into a 250-crore company in the next three years?” Aggarwal asks. 

The plan includes building AI agents for talent engagement, helping companies create their own talent communities on Unstop, offering personalised talent pipelines, expanding internationally through existing enterprise clients, and adding more AI-driven hiring automation tools. The platform is already supporting global campaigns for brands such as Agoda and Unilever across multiple countries.

According to Market Growth Reports, the online recruitment market size in India is estimated at approximately $1.07 billion in 2025, driven by digital hiring across IT, BFSI, and ecommerce sectors, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of around 7.6%. Unstop.ai currently reaches less than 2% of this audience, but aims to achieve 25% penetration in the next three years.

“By 2030, we’re aiming to have over 100 million users, 100,000 employers, and help 10 million people find their first or second job,” he tells YourStory.