StrideAhead was founded by Piyush Gupta, serial entrepreneur who also co-founded Verismart.ai, an identity blockchain platform to automate and standardize KYC and compliance process across verticals. StrideAahead has presence pan india and currently has diversified advisors in their board including Rachit Poddar and Manish Gupta, Founder JIMS & UINCEPT, one of India’s leading edtech incubators. Piyush Gupta discusses with Rajneesh De, Consulting Editor, APAC News Network about StrideAhead and its solutions.
How would you trace the genesis of Stride Ahead?
In 2019 October we registered our company and started working full time by 2020 February. The idea of creating a platform like Stride Ahead happened while we were doing pro bono mentorship for many college students. We realized that a lot of personality and behavioral data could help us to streamline the career journey for the students. From there, I conceptualized the idea with my mentors and prominent talent acquisition specialists.
How does the Stride Ahead solution work?
An AI powered personalised career assistant. Its reinforcement based deep learning technology makes sure it learns accurately and continuously about our users with the objective of providing a career that will suit them in every way and lead to a fulfilling life. Not only this, the platform aims to provide fair, efficient, and predictive talent hunt solutions by providing organizational data analytics to prospect institutions that will present itself as a boon for our users.
What are the solutions and services in the Stride Ahead portfolio?
The key stakeholders we thought about included Youth (Age group 15-28), Recruiters and Mentors. Our offerings and our platform was targeted to meet those key challenges faced by these various Stakeholders.
- Carefully planned continuous automated scored assessments: Our continuous and Holistic proprietary traits and skill assessments provides digital profile about user on Multiple cognitive and non-cognitive parameters
- Data backed continuous career path recommendations
Our services include
- Data driven mentor matching: Our Mentor DeepMatch algorithm™ matches the right mentors (include subject matter experts, career coaches and mental health coaches) for the mentee.
- Bootcamps and teasers
- 1:1 and cohort-based Career and upskilling Mentorship programs
How does reinforcement-based deep learning technology work?
AI rewards and penalises the system on their action performed on our platform, and the goal of AI is to get maximum rewards, this way the whole process and outcome becomes more personalised and effective for the user.
What is your client base, who are your marquee clients and what are their use cases?
The client base includes 14 b2b, 2700+ b2c players. Our marquee clients are mostly Edutech companies and state governments. Their use case is Cognitive assessments and career guidance mentorship.
What were the challenges for content-based edtech providers during the pandemic?
The challenges for content-based EdTech providers would include:
- Lack of personalisation and gamification in the course structure,there is high cost involved in creating quality content supported by tech
- Since everybody was jumping into content creation, quality and certifications lost the value
- There was no proper assessment framework after the content delivery, the learning path was not properly mapped
Bigger players became more big and new entrants either had to follow the aggressive sales strategy or they spent more focus on their niche to get an acquisition, either way the vision was somehow not fulfilled. But the overall market has become more mature and now people are understanding the balance between offline and online learning systems.
What is the GTM strategy followed by Stride Ahead?
We have started mostly with B2B and B2I segment, we leverage our sales partners who were already in education system from last 20-25 years. For B2C we are focussing more on college graduates and early professionals by leveraging professional communities.
Which are going to be your key focus areas in the next few quarters?
Our key focus areas in the next few quarters would be:
- Tie ups with B2I and Corporates,
- Building robust automations for mentorship framework,
- Scale up our sales partnership network, and
- Reaching monthly revenue of 15K USD.
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