AI video bot platform for career hacks, Expertrons has raised an undisclosed amount in a seed funding round from Nikhil Vora (MD, Sixth Sense Venture), Iceland Venture Studio, LetsVenture, Samyakth Capital and a few angel investors - Rohit Chanana (Partner, Sarcha Advisors), Sumit Chhazed (co-founder, OTO Capital) and Dr. Sukanta Ganguly (President & Board of Directors at ClickIPO).
The company plans to use this latest funding to enhance its tech capabilities and expand its product offerings to enable organisations with its video bots.
The startup is founded by IIT Bombay alumni - Vivek Gupta and Jatin Solanki, batchmates and second-time entrepreneurs with over eight years’ experience in education technology. Jatin’s previous venture was StepApp Eduisfun, a gamified learning platform which served over a million students in K-12 domain while Vivek’s previous venture Plancess, a test preparation company, was acquired by a public listed edtech company.
“Expertrons is essentially Netflix for career hacks. We founded it with the vision to reimagine career decisions for the 1.87 billion professionals globally who change their careers 5 to 7 times in their lifetime,” says Vivek Gupta, co-founder of Expertrons.
Expertrons claims it already has the largest library of career experiences with over 12,000 minutes of video bots of 550+ experts who are pursuing a dream career at top firms like BCG, Google, One Plus, Morgan Stanley, Pepsi (Mexico), Rakuten (Japan) or even recent graduates from top B Schools like IIMs, ISBs or Harvard. While these ‘experts’ are busy working or studying, their video bots can train millions of aspirants. Users can talk to the videobots of experts to get precise first-hand career hack experience by asking questions like - ‘How did they build their profile to get shortlisted for Harvard?’ or ‘What were the different rounds of interviews at Google?’.
“Expertrons’ deep tech AI recommendation engine based on numerous data points personalises the best-suited experts and career options for aspirants. After the unique videobot interaction, experts get a lifetime earning opportunity via referral bonus and one on one consultations to interested aspirants,” shares Jatin Solanki, co-founder, Expertrons.
The funding has come at a time when the global lockdown due to COVID-19 has triggered a significant rise in the need for upskilling professionals.
In India, there are 30 million youngsters completing their higher education and spending close to $5000 for it - all aimed at getting a dream career opportunity. A majority of these aspirants are first-generation graduates with no one in their circle to guide them on their career choices. Expertrons bridges this last mile gap to help students and professionals make the right career decisions.
“Expertrons was a compelling deep tech for investors on the LetsVenture platform interested in ed-tech and allied verticals, jobs and professional networks. While the focus today is on career guidance, the core AI video bot technology could have some good parallel applications in large markets,” says Sunitha K R, Director, LetsVenture.
“Expertrons is solving a relevant problem. It’s a space that is very fragmented where every aspirant would like to do better professionally. Expertrons bring consolidation to the same in an innovative way that has the potential to go extremely viral. And the cherry on the cake is a strong team with both founders having run large organisations previously” says Nikhil Vora, MD, Sixth Sense Ventures, who has previously invested in companies like Paytm, Bewakoof.com, and Purplle.
Besides being associated with 30+ colleges in India, Expertrons says it is amongst the top 3 startups globally to get selected for the TecLabs Accelerator, Mexico. As a part of which, they are doing a pilot with Mexico’s top university - Tec De Monterrey with 26 campuses (and over 100,000 students), to help them boost admissions and placements. The company also says it was also awarded a special prize at Startup Masterclass, Pune conducted by IITK & IITD Alumni association.
Other than the career guidance application of their AI video bot technology, Expertrons is also developing use cases of their technology to drive sales, clear customer queries, generate leads and even internal training for organisations.