US-based Interview Kickstart acts as a platform for working technology professionals who want to prepare to work at top tech companies. Over 20,000 people have gone through its programmes spanning AI, Machine Learning, Data Science and other advanced engineering and product areas, so far.
The programmes – priced within a wide range of $2,000 to $9,500, depending on duration of curriculum choice – at Interview Kickstart are designed and delivered by 550 current and former software engineers, data scientists and recruiters at companies such as Meta, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google.
Students of Interview Kickstart, called working learners, have received job offers that regularly exceed $250,000 in terms of annual salary package on an average, with the highest offer having come at $1.2 million, founder Ryan Valles told ET.
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“We are testing India as a market currently. Currently about 98% of our revenue is all US focussed. We are now thinking of leveraging the funds to expand globally and India is the first test market for us in that expansion,” Valles said.
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The company was originally founded in 2014 in the San Francisco Bay AreaRegion, California as a sole proprietorship-structured company by Valles’ cofounder Soham Mehta, who previously worked at technology companies such as Box, eBay and Microsoft.
Prior to joining Interview Kickstart, Valles was an entrepreneur-in-residence at Accel Partners and founder and CEO of Dealsandyou, among other roles in the past.
In its initial days, it ran as an offline setup to help train engineers get recruited into Google, Valles said, adding that in 2018 the company started to take shape as an online business. In 2023, the parent company Upward & Onwards was incorporated.
The company currently functions remotely with 130 staffers globally, a majority of whom are based in India. Valles declined to share details of the company’s revenue or valuation scale but said “we are closer to a series B-C scale so we are relatively scaled.”
The $10 million cheque is the first round of funding it has raised. The company has been running bootstrapped and cash-flow positive since inception, Valles said.
“Interview Kickstart presented a unique opportunity in this otherwise difficult environment… Our diligence led to discovering delighted working learners arming themselves with new skills and opportunities to thrive in the fiercely competitive tech industry,” Karthik Reddy, managing partner, Blume Ventures, said in a statement.
The early-stage India-focused venture fund is currently investing out of Fund IV, with a $300 million corpus. It typically invests at seed and pre-Series A stages of funding of a startup.
