Hotmail cofounder Sabeer Bhatia’s Showreel to become AI-based learning platform

In a pivot, Hotmail cofounder Sabeer Bhatia’s video resume platform, Showreel, will become an artificial intelligence (AI) based learning platform. Bhatia has launched an AI-based course and certification programme in entrepreneurship in partnership, touted as the first such course, with an Indian university, Jamia Millia Islamia.

Founded in 2021, the startup failed to gain traction among users and started exploring the AI educational space.

“Our goal was to solve the unemployment problem. We started looking at how to promote entrepreneurship…While trying to define content for entrepreneurship, AI came around and we started using AI to create content from the internet,” Bhatia told ET.

The entrepreneurship course is generated by AI and consists of short-form videos as well as evaluations based on verbal interviews. AI will be used to evaluate student responses.

To generate revenue, Showreel will collect a fee of Rs 6,000 from students who wish to obtain a certificate for successful completion of the entrepreneurship course. Additionally, the students will earn six units of credit from the university. Each course offered in Jamia has a designated number of credit units allocated to it.

“This is our first revenue opportunity in partnership with Jamia. If a million students choose to complete this course and earn a certificate in entrepreneurship, we earn Rs 600 crore,” Bhatia said.

The Silicon Valley-based startup is self-funded, with Bhatia actively seeking to pique the interest of venture capitalists to back the startup. “We are talking to three other universities in the US. Once we sign any one (deal), I think raising capital should not be a problem,” he said. All these are in the advanced stages of negotiations, he claimed.Upskilling businesses essentially target working professionals who are either looking to move to a better existing pay scale or be more efficient at their current jobs.

Bhatia’s bet on creating short-form videos comes from the trend of people in the new generation finding this format of content more amenable.

To back Startups

Bhatia, along with sovereign wealth funds as partners, aims to support tech startups that are innovative, have original ideas and are disruptive.

“I’m raising a very massive fund to fund 100,000 startups. The fund will be created sometime in the first quarter of next year and we‘ll be raising millions of dollars for that. That is, sovereign wealth funds as partners for this endeavour,” Bhatia said.

Numerous venture capital firms have shown a keen interest in the deeptech sector and are actively seeking to invest in AI-based startups. “The goal is to back some critical ideas that fundamentally change their businesses or the industries they operate in,” he added.

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