Skillenza, a platform for companies to host challenges and build communities, has secured INR 4.7 crores in a seed round led by Blume Ventures and Indian Angel Network. Other investors in this series include Aneesh Reddy from Capillary, Surojit Niyogi from HomeBit, Raghu from Taxi for Sure, Pallav from Fusion Charts and Tracxn. The company had previously raised INR 1.6 crores in angel funding in 2015.
The company, formerly known as Venturesity, has worked with big names of the Indian technology and e-commerce ecosystem such as Ola Cabs, Amazon, and IBM. Through the new platform, Skillenza empowers enterprises to create a talent community and host an array of challenges, be it a 30-minute quiz, programming challenges, case study competition or 24-hour hackathons to engage and evaluate talent. The platform currently has 350K professionals actively solving these challenges posted by enterprises, and they get rewarded for their performance which includes jobs, internships, prizes, bragging rights and learning.
The new modules on the platform help enterprises to engage professionals across skill sets like programming, machine learning, operations, inside sales and product management. The community feature allows businesses to build a pool of talent which helps them to be proactive.
The founding team comprises of IIT and NIT alumni with a wide array of industry experience. Subhendu Panigrahi, co-founder and CEO, says “Our platform is a two-sided marketplace. On one side enterprises and startups are looking to engage professionals and on the other, professionals are looking for the best opportunities. The challenges’ model allows both sides to engage in a meaningful way. Earlier, companies were only able to engage programmers on the platform, but now, we have expanded our focus to empower customers (companies) to hire professionals in other skill sets. The funds from this seed round will focus on boosting our skill assessment modules, to increase user engagement with highly qualified professionals within our user base and to further build our expertise in the challenge-centric domain.”
Speaking about the investment, Karthik Reddy from Blume Ventures says “Skillenza’s product suite to build, assess and retain quality communities for enterprises is a new-age approach to solving the talent crunch and talent retention. Increasingly, the current standard resume will become less relevant in the future as companies want more colour on the skills and incoming talent wants to boost and showcase their skill sets”.
Blume Ventures is one of the leading early-stage tech-focused VC funds in India and has a portfolio of many leading technology companies such as Unacademy, Healthifyme, Exotel and Dunzo.
Skillenza is empowering customers through its suite of offerings – namely – talent branding and hiring, crowdsourced innovation and product evangelism.
About Skillenza:
Skillenza, a three-year old Indian start-up, is a platform for professionals to join enterprise and skill based communities where they showcase their skills by solving challenges. The platform helps such professionals to discover opportunities relevant to their skillsets. Additionally, the enterprise communities give potential candidates the feel of the company culture and ethos, along with a sneak peek at the expected role. The platform itself enables users to upskill existing skills, develop new skills and consume content. The data generated from all user activities on the platform helps to create a very personalized experience graph for each user.
Companies are using Skillenza to create a community on the platform and host challenges. These challenges help the companies to brand themselves, reach out to a broader audience, engage them and filter out the best hire. The other use cases for enterprises apart from talent branding and hiring are product evangelism and open innovation. Skillenza helps companies to build an active pipeline of candidates.