Gray Matters Capital, a US-based investor has funded Rs1 crore to GUVI, an IIT-Madras incubated startup based out of Chennai. GUVI is basically an online skill acceleration and hiring platform for IT Skills. Students can learn coding even in vernacular languages at this venture thereby improving their prospects of finding employment manifold. This is the first external funding for the startup and comes from an institution, edLabs, an entity belonging to Gray Matters Capital.
A GUVI Community Conference was conducted at IIT-Madras in which there was widespread participation by recruiters and academia. The funding now received by GUVI will be used towards creating an army of one million coders by 2020, quite an ambitious target. Bridging Gender Gaps in Coding is another mission the startup has taken upon itself.
edLabs has said in its statement that it saw the need for a paradigm shift in the skillsets demonstrated by the large body of engineering graduates in the country who cannot find jobs since the IT companies don’t consider them employable. GUVI’s efforts in this direction could change that perception and that is one of the major reasons Gray Matters Capital chose to make the investment in the IIT-M incubated startup.
Speaking of bridging Gender Gaps in Coding, it has been brought out that over four-fifths of the developers, the world over, are male and this ratio may have to be altered to achieve a more balanced gender ratio among the coding community.
GUVI’s USP lies in it being an integrated Edu-Tech platform for learning technology skills like Python, Machine Learning, Big Data, Java, C, C++, MongoDB, Android, in the form of videos in vernacular languages such as Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Hindi, Marathi and Bengali, among others. The startup has already created more than 1,40,000 professional software coders, which comprises students as well as working professionals across the globe.
GUVI is supported by 60+ IT product companies like PayPal, JUSPAY, Chargebee, Gofrugal, Ionix as recruitment partners from Bengaluru and Chennai. GUVI gets its revenue from both the engineering students and other professionals who join the online courses, as well as the companies which recruit their students.