Ex-Unacademy COO Vivek Sinha raises $11 mn from Lightspeed, Matrix for edtech startup

Beyond Odds Funding

Former Unacademy chief operating officer (COO) Vivek Sinha, on April 19, launched his new venture, Beyond Odds Technologies, with a seed investment of $11 million, led by Matrix Partners India and Lightspeed.

This comes months after Moneycontrol exclusively reported about the deal in December and said that Oyo group CEO and founder Ritesh Agarwal and Unacademy CEO and co-founder Gaurav Munjal also participated in the round.

In a statement, the company confirmed the development and added that others, including upGrad’s Mayank Kumar, Livspace’s Ramakant Sharma, Tracxn’s Abhishek Goyal, CloudNine Hospitals’s Rohit MA, Softbank’s Sumer Juneja, and Steadview Capital’s Puneet Kumar have also backed the venture.

‘Beyond Odds Technologies’ said that it is an employability-led, technology-enabled platform that recruits, trains, certifies, and deploys candidates for blue collar job roles in industries like healthcare, education, construction, and hospitality.

“Our platform will address the shortages in skilled workforce in both domestic and global markets by creating high-quality supply from India. Our first initiative, ‘Emversity,’ is a higher education brand that helps universities integrate their degrees with industry-relevant skills. Our courses also come with ‘built-in income’, so candidates do not have to wait for completion of their formal higher education to earn their first pay cheque. Other features of these courses include ‘work abroad integrated’ modules, and extensive placement assistance,” said Sinha, founder and CEO of the company.

Sinha, who was a business head at Oyo between April 2018 and September 2020, quit the travel tech company to join Unacademy. After a three-year stint, he left Unacademy and has now started his own venture.

Sinha’s resignation was among a series of top level departures at Unacademy, with chief of staff Abhyudayay Rana and chief financial officer Subramanian Ramachandran also moving out. The exits came a year after chief marketing officer Karan Shroff quit the company.

Beyond Odds’ higher education brand Emversity is launching its first centre in Bangalore on April 20, followed by six other centres this quarter in cities including Hyderabad, Delhi, Nagpur, Kochi, and Ranchi.

For their first cohort, Emversity has tied up with several leading healthcare institutions, such as Fortis Hospitals, Core Diagnostics and so on to offer programs that are tailored to meet the skill requirements of these institutions, and the same institutions will also be the recruiting partners for full-time jobs as well as internships for Emversity’s students.

“To achieve India's goal of becoming a developed economy by 2047, harnessing our demographic dividend is essential. Emversity is dedicated to preparing India's youth for the workforce and fostering the growth of sunrise industries through scalable skilled manpower. With our longstanding acquaintance with Vivek, we commend his grasp of the issue and capacity to establish pioneering institutions. We extend our best wishes to the Emversity team for their journey ahead,” said Rajat Agarwal, Managing Director at Matrix Partners India.

In partnership with top-rated universities, these centres will facilitate Bachelor's degrees as well as certification courses. According to the company, in the current academic cycle Emversity will offer courses like UG programmes in emergency and trauma care technology, anaesthesia and operation theatre technology, medical laboratory technology, hospital administration, and certification Programmes in phlebotomy, nursing assistant, and dialysis technology.

“Today, India experiences a unique situation where we have an expanding workforce supply but a talent and skills gap across industries. Beyond Odds recognises and aims to tackle these limitations of the current education system. By enabling vocational skills-based education among students in partnership with public and private partnerships, they're solving both the demand and supply problems in college education today,” said Harsha Kumar, Partner at Lightspeed.