India Quotient-backed Masai School launches AI-powered tech recruitment platform

Masai School co-founder and CEO Prateek Shukla.

India Quotient-backed edtech startup Masai School on October 30 launched Level Up, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered platform for job seekers and recruiters at a time when there is a slowdown in tech hiring in India.

"There has not been any kind of disruption in the tech recruitment ecosystem in the last 20 years. The large incumbents like Naukri and LinkedIn still look like platforms of the 1990s and 2000s," Masai School co-founder and CEO Prateek Shukla told Moneycontrol.

According to Shukla, Level Up would help job-seekers find relevant listings after a detailed competency assessment with the help of 90-minute interviews with tech leads or SDE threes in Indian companies on the platform.

Level Up will also help segregate companies on the basis of roles available, salary range, work modes and culture at the organisation.

“We use generative AI quite extensively in this platform because while the interviewer is assessing your skill set and quantifying it, we are also doing it in the background as well through generative AI. As a result, the right kind of competency mapping of every job seeker is done,” said Shukla.

Also Read: Indian edtech firms leverage AI to curb cash burn, growth hiring

For recruiters, it would offer insights into talent, facilitating effective hiring, the company said.

With Level Up, Masai School also wants to solve the problem of swarming irrelevant profiles, unidentified proficiency of skill sets and credibility of references and endorsements for recruiters to make better and faster hiring decisions.

Founded in 2019 by Shukla, Nrupul Dev, and Yogesh Bhat, Masai School trains tech aspirants in full stack web and Android development, and also helps them get placed through its partner network.

Monetisation Plans

Job seekers have the option to apply to the companies directly on Level Up, which is a free service open to all.

The platform, however, also has another job assurance programme in a subscription-based model, which allows users to evaluate job opportunities, arrange interviews and prepare them better.

The programme charges a flat fee of Rs 10,000 and Masai School provides a guarantee of receiving a job offer within 60 days. In case, the user does not get a job offer, the total amount will be refunded, said Shukla.

Similarly for recruiters, Level Up will charge Rs 75,000 to evaluate and hire applicants on the platform, he added.

Roll-out plans

The company did a beta release of Level Up, which is available as a web application, in September for the external audience. It plans to focus on tech hiring and will gradually move on to data science and product management roles.

"The idea is to disrupt LinkedIn in the next three years. If the platform is going to explode, we will be able to do that much faster," Shukla added.

Shukla also said that Masai School plans to go into the market to raise capital, exclusively for Level Up, without sharing more details on when it plans to do so.

The company last raised $10 million in a Series B fundraising round led by Omidyar Network India. The company also counts India Quotient, Alteria Capital and Unitus Ventures as investors.

Masai School is also backed by angel investors like Kunal Shah of Cred, Vijay Shekhar Sharma of Paytm, Mohit Tandon of Delhivery, and Abhishek Goyal of Tracxn, among others.