A clutch of angel investors—including LivSpace founder Ramakant Sharma, CarDekho’s Umang Kumar and Anupam Mittal of Shaadi.com—participated in the fundraising. The fresh capital will be used by the firm for hiring, product development and fuelling its expansion to grow its revenue by five times over the next 12 months, according to a statement on Wednesday.
Founded by IITians Sashank Reddy Gujjula, Anupam Pedarla and Rahul Attuluri during the pandemic, NxtWave wants to build India’s largest “online employability university” for those who want a career in technology without a traditional college degree. It aims to produce one million new-age developers every year. NxtWave, at present, offers training programmes in regional languages for Industry 4.0 tech careers, targeting college students, graduates and early young professionals in small towns.
“We believe that digital pedagogy must be radically different for small-town India to create transformative learning experiences,” CEO Attuluri said. “To achieve this, we have adopted a multi-pronged approach in designing our ‘Continuous Career Building Programs’ leveraging technology, pedagogy and vernacular content.”
The company claims to have an active student community of more than 200,000 members from over 3,000 colleges. Its paying customers come from more than 250+ districts of India, with more than 85% in non-metro and rural areas. In the last six months, 250+ companies have hired NxtWave graduates including the likes of Google and Reliance Jio, according to the company statement.
“NxtWave’s vernacular and semi-synchronous format…plugs a massive gap for students and early professionals…,” said Vaibhav Domkundwar of Better Capital, which
recently raised $15.28 million for its maiden fund. “It creates an on-ramp for them into the fast-growing tech ecosystem—and in a way that was never done before.”
