This woman entrepreneur’s edtech startup helps GenZ with mentorship, learning, and earning opportunities

Despite having one of the largest youth populations in the world, and a plethora of colleges and learning opportunities, most young people in India do not have the skills that businesses today need.

This is why Divya Jain spent the last decade travelling across India, working with students at the grassroots level. She set up over 150 centres across states, in partnerships with governments and universities that worked with students to help them upskill and get the right career opportunities to move ahead in life.

“The pandemic was really an opportunity in disguise as it allowed me to scale this to a solution that can truly change the lives of millions through Seekho,” says Divya, of her second venture after Safeducate, which worked towards developing the right competencies to enable learners to make them job-ready.

Divya has a master’s in management from Cambridge University (UK), a law degree from University of London, and a BA (Honours) Economics from Hindu College, Delhi.

She worked in investment banking at Citigroup and was also a business consultant with Ernst & Young.

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Bridging the gap

Divya believes there is a massive gap between the CV of the candidate and the job description (JD) of employers. Businesses, on the other end, are struggling as they have no measurable way of hiring the right people for the right jobs.

She explains: “There exists a gap in the market and we bridged this gap by building Seekho. It is a CV-to-JD career platform that helps GenZ in taking the professional leap by providing mentorship, learning, and earning opportunities - all on a single platform.

“The platform was launched keeping three stakeholders/pillars in mind - users, corporates, and mentors. Seekho is the first and, at this point, only platform in the jobtech space, bringing all three stakeholders together on a single platform.”

As a video-first micro learning-based community, Seekho offers users multiple video format offerings, including live classes, long-format and short videos. Learning is not just related to the course. Users also get to be a part of focus-based online learning communities, which creates engaging peer-to-peer learning experiences.

“The multiple video format offerings include live classes, short series, and long cohort-based courses. Based on interest, users can access short video series comprising 60-second videos. To deep dive into a subject, they can enrol for longer-term cohort-based courses and programmes. Users can also subscribe to Seekho’s academies at just Rs 99 a month, which gives access to a large number of live, interactive events as well as community engagement,” she says.

The edtech startup lets corporates match with users and enables them to hire from an industry-ready talent pool.

According to Divya, Seekho’s recommendation engine reduces professional hiring timelines to half by matching ‘only relevant’ jobs seekers and employers. She claims that its AI/ML capabilities help corporates make hiring decisions, 5X faster.

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Reducing the JD-to-job timeline

Born in a COVID world, Seekho is helmed by Divya, Arihant Jain, and Ajeet Singh Kushwaha. The other co-founders are serial entrepreneurs who have helped build multiple tech startups, including HealthKart, 1MG, Joe Hukum, and Freshworks.

“I was the Founder and CEO of Safeducate, India’s largest logistics skilling company. Due to the pandemic, Safeducate had to temporarily shut down 150 of its training centres across India, displacing thousands of students who had been enrolled across various skilling programmes. Arihant and Ajeet took the challenge of completing the training and placement process of Safeducate’s 3,000 students. During this process, they realised that besides learning, placement, and employment opportunities are also a pain point for the youth. With this in mind, the unfolding of Seekho began,” Divya says.

Seekho’s key target markets are graduate students in Tier I to III-level colleges as well as young professionals in the early years of their career.

While its users currently come from over 340 districts across India, its primary focus is on metro cities, followed by smaller state capitals and upcoming satellite cities like Indore, Patna, Lucknow, Pune, and Etawah.

On the corporate side, it is targeting high-growth sectors with a high demand for skilled workforce and companies looking to reduce their JD-to-job timeline. The platform has a strong focus on profiles like product management, consulting, SCM, finance, marketing. and growth.

Seekho has multiple sources of revenue. Its flagship offering is an affordable subscription that offers access to live classes, learning resources, and job opportunities - across multiple career choices/categories. This is powered by a gamified points system that rewards users and creates a leaderboard (talent board) of potential candidates for corporates.

“We run live and asynchronous certifications, which are paid for by the users. We also get paid by corporates for hiring and training their workforce,” Divya adds.

So far, 350 mentors have engaged 500,000 young professionals on the platform and worked with students across 45 colleges/universities. With 100 corporates posting jobs every month, Seekho expects to enable one million users by the end of 2022.

Divya believes edtech as a space has become incredibly crowded in the past two years.

“The market currently is extremely unorganised, with thousands of creators and experts creating their own platforms for upskilling. Unlike K-12, which has startup giants, the non-tech learning space is still a wide ocean. Internationally, we feel LinkedIn would be closest to what we are trying to create.”

In 2019, Seekho’s parent company, Seekify, raised a seed funding of $1.5 million from Sequoia Surge.

“With COVID making the world flatter, the world is entering a phase where skills matter more than ever. Given this landscape, Seekho plans to disrupt the higher education system that we believe will truly democratise the higher education system. By the end of next year, we would have impacted millions of job seekers by giving them an outcome-driven platform that will also partner with them as they grow their careers. Corporates would also have a fully stacked solution that can help tighten their hiring funnel, ensuring they make a great hire every single time,” Divya says.