Greater Pacific Capital leads round for India's NxtWave

Existing investor Orios Venture Partners also took part in the round. According to AVCJ Research, NxtWave secured USD 2.8m in pre-Series A funding from Orios and Better Capital in late 2021.

Founded in 2020 by Sashank Reddy Gujjula, Anupam Pedarla and Rahul Attuluri – all Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) graduates – NxtWave claims to have helped more than 200,000 students from over 3,000 colleges find work with 1,250 companies, from start-ups to Fortune 500 members.

The company offers “continuous career building programmes” focused on areas such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, full-stack development, cybersecurity, virtual reality and artificial reality, and blockchain.

Anup Jain, a managing partner at Orios, noted that 63% of Indian graduates are unemployed and 3m new technology sector jobs will be created over the next few years. This equates to an opportunity in the tech upskilling space worth more than USD 8bn per year.

“India has world-class engineering institutes, and as the country positions itself as one of the leaders of the information era, the country needs to build the capacity to provide quality learning, particularly in artificial intelligence, for 500m young Indians,” Ketan Patel, founder and CEO of Greater Pacific Capital told The Economic Times.

“Leveraging technology to fill this gap is the key to unlocking India's economic potential and providing quality employment to its youth, which NxtWave is doing.”

Other start-ups in this space include Simplilearn, which closed a USD 45m funding round led by GSV Ventures in November 2022. The Blackstone Group acquired 70% of the company in 2021 for USD 250m.

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• Topics
• South Asia
• Technology
• Early-stage
• India
• TMT
• Education
• Greater Pacific Capital
• Orios Venture Partners