Startup Street: Making Indian Engineers Job-Ready
Here’s what went on this week on Startup Street.
This week on Startup Street, a venture that wants to make the army of engineers passing out of Indian colleges more employable. ‘Dost Education’ won a $25,000 prize for empowering low-income, illiterate or less-educated parents to educate their children. And the world’s most-valuable startup just deleted 60 lakh videos from its India application. Here’s what went on.
BridgeLabz Wants To Improve Employability Of Engineers
Eight out of 10 Indian engineers, a recent survey showed, are not employable straight out of college. Narayan Mahadevan wants to change that.
After a career spanning 25 years as an engineer across the U.S. and India, Mahadevan decided to do something about the cliched narrative of engineers not getting jobs. In 2015, he set up BridgeLabz, an Amazon Web Services-recognised incubator, that provides skilling in new-age technologies through hands-on sessions and real-time problem solving.
Engineers have long been the brunt of jokes around employment. Aspiring Minds' Annual Employability Survey 2019 showed only 4.6 percent of recently passed engineers could code well, and only 2.5 percent had skills in artificial intelligence. The report also said ad-hoc measures in the curriculum wouldn’t fix the problem, which required systemic changes.
“If we were to pin down the reason for this employability gap, it would be simply absence of experience in the relevant skills that are required for emerging tech jobs,” Mahadevan told BloombergQuint. “Today, the tech talent requirements are not plain vanilla. We equip engineers on emerging tech like machine learning, artificial intelligence, blockchain, data engineering, DevOps, cloud technology and mobility.”
While this may seem like any other skilling institute, BridgeLabz offering stands out in one aspect: it does not charge any fee for skilling engineers in new technologies and provides a job guarantee. Instead, its revenue stream hinges on the companies that hire engineers from them.
“The mandating companies pay for the talent they need,” Mahadevan said. “We charge on an average Rs 2.5 lakh for every talent.”
Yet, the startup also takes the onus on itself to provide top-quality engineers to companies. “BridgeLabz underwrites the quality of the engineers we deliver to the companies. What this means is that we bear the financial risk of a bad hire. So we have more skin in the game.”
The startup currently has labs in Mumbai and Bengaluru. It placed about 500 engineers—in companies including Capgemini, JDA Software, LafargeHolcim and Yatra.com—in 2018-19. It plans to place another 2,000-3,000 engineers in the current fiscal. BridgeLabz also has a product management team that incubates startup ideas its candidates have.
It has gained some recognition too. The Maharashtra government named it among the top 100 startups from the state for 2019. It also received seed funding of $100,000 from private investors and some angels.
Mahadevan said the startup will be profitable in the coming financial year.
Indian Education Startup Bags A $25,000 Prize
‘Dost Education’, founded in 2018, bagged $25,000 from The Next Billion Edtech Prize 2019—run by the U.K.-based Varkey Foundation—for its ability to empower parents of all education backgrounds to educate their children in the early years.
The foundation is renowned for recognising the most-innovative technology destined to have a radical impact on education in low-income and emerging countries.
Dost Education received the tech prize along with two other winners from Tanzania and Egypt, according to the Global Education and Skills Forum website. The startup’s application provides short videos and audio clips that builds a child’s foundation in pre-school years.
“Dost software, audio content, and toolkits make it easy, fun and addictive for parents to boost their child's early development, so low-income families need no longer send their children to primary school behind and without a chance to catch up,” said the Global Education and Skills Forum, according to a PTI report.
“It’s really exciting to bring Dost to the global stage at GESF and be one of the three winners of the prize,” said Dost’s Chief Executive Officer Sneha Sheth. “It motivates us even more to keep working on our mission to help parents to unlock their child’s full potential.”
Dost was one of the six finalists—Fineazy (Ghana), Praxilabs (Egypt), Sabaq (Pakistan), Signa (Brazil), Ubongo (Tanzania). Praxilabs and Uongo were the other two winners.
Six finalists were chosen to pitch on the main GESF plenary stage in front of over 1,500 delegates. The other winners to also receive $25,000 each included Ubongo from Tanzania and PraxiLabs from Egypt.
The winners were selected by a panel of judges comprising venture capitalists, philanthropic investors, experts in Edtech and learning sciences, and senior education policy makers, led by TechCrunch Editor-at-Large Mike Butcher.
As many as 30 startups were selected to pitch over three days for the Next Billion Edtech Prize, which focuses on low-income and emerging economies.
TikTok Removes Over 60 Lakh Videos In India
Chinese short-video platform, run by the world’s most valuable startup ByteDance, has removed over 60 lakh videos from India since July last year as it struggles to filter improper content and meet guidelines.
The videos which have been removed violated community guidelines, the company said in a press statement on Friday.
“As a global community, safety has been one of TikTok’s key priorities... [These steps] reinforce our ongoing commitment to ensure that our platform remains a safe and positive space for our Indian users and we discharge our obligations under the Intermediary Guidelines of India, in a meaningful manner,” TikTok’s Director of Global Public Policy Helena Lersch said.
TikTok also introduced an ‘age-gate’ feature that will only allow those aged 13 years and above to login and create an account. This, it said, will further add to the safety mechanisms in place to ensure that underage users don’t use the platform.
The social media company is fighting against a ban in India. The Madras High Court directed the Centre to ban TikTok mobile application over “pornographic and inappropriate contents”. The Supreme Court agreed to hear a plea challenging the high court order on April 15.
The app has more than 500 million active users worldwide, beating Twitter (326 million active users) and Snapchat (186 million daily active users), according to Statista Charts, which sourced its information from company reports. More than a third of these users are from India.
The company’s announcements follow the launch of TikTok's Safety Centre and resource pages tackling bullying activities in 10 major local languages: Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, Punjabi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam and Oriya.