Leverage Edu, higher education platform, is solving the career maze with AI

Increasing income, rising interest in foreign institutes present a market opportunity for higher education platform Leverage Edu

What and where should I study next? Are there jobs available in this career? What is my interest? Like for most students who are on the verge of choosing their career, these were questions troubling Delhi University student Sarthi Dhawan a few years back.
 
“Being a commerce student, I had an extremely diverse background. I had previously interned with disparate firms and performed a variety of roles in sales, management, derivatives trading and equity research. My mind was torn between Master of Finance and Master of Management,” he says.
 
Dhawan finally chose to pursue Master of Finance in Germany’s Frankfurt School of Finance & Management after he figured out all the answers with help from a mentor he met on Leverage Edu.
 
Leverage is among the many career guidance start-ups that have made a business out of increasing interest among Indian students to study abroad. The start-up recently raised over $1 million in a funding round led by DSG Consumer Partners and Blume Ventures.
 
Founded by Akshay Chaturvedi and Rajiv Ganjoo in 2017, the start-up claims to have achieved breakeven with close to 100,000 monthly users. The start-up competes with Perspectico, Career360, Careerfunda, Young Buzz, and Stoodnt among others.

How the platform works
 
The start-up, according to Chaturvedi, is more of a career advice marketplace than just another career counselling platform, as it not only focuses on mentoring students but also helps them get education loan and find the right accommodation.
 
Matching students to the right course, college and mentor is the primary service that the platform provides. It employs artificial intelligence to do the matching, based on the information students enter while registering on its website.
 
The services on the platform are free up to the matching part. Post this stage, the company charges a one-time fee that varies from college to college. Chaturvedi says the charges range from Rs 25,000 to Rs 3 lakh.
 
Dhawan says the company charged him around Rs 75,000.
 
On the payment side, Leverage remunerates mentors on a one-time basis for every student they guide. Charu Arora, senior product manager, Health at Jio, says she mentored one student and received a one-time fee of Rs 10,000.
 
Apart from this, the platform also has a vertical — Ready for Work — that helps students crack their first job.
 

Leverage Edu founders: Akshay Chaturvedi (right) with Rajiv Ganjoo

Opportunities
 
The education market in India is expanding fast and is expected to nearly double to $180 billion by 2020. In years to come, India will have the world’s largest tertiary-age population and the second-largest graduate talent pipeline.
 
This and the increasing interest of Indian students to study abroad is what Leverage is banking upon.
 
However, it’s the international admissions that the platform lays more emphasis on. Explaining the reason, Chaturvedi says admissions to top Indian colleges depends primarily on written examinations for which coaching institutes are already available. “But foreign colleges take students for the person they are (by analysing their CV, essays and interviews), presenting more scope for our business.”
 
Challenges
 
Foreign colleges may be witnessing more traction in India, but the numbers are still a small fraction of the total students vying a spot in Indian colleges.
 
Further, Indian students are prone to taking career-related decisions with help from family and friends. “It’s still difficult to push the entire experience online, since Indian parents and students, both, have hesitation in an entirely technology-led experience,” says Chaturvedi.
 
Sajith Pai of Blume Ventures counts effective execution as the biggest challenges for Leverage Edu. “The other big challenge is a competitive space, both from the emerging organised start-ups and the existing established providers of counselling and support services,” he says.
 
According to Dhawan, the whole process of fixing and meeting one's mentor is still cumbersome and needs to be fixed.


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