21 unicorn founders and serial entrepreneurs including CRED’s Kunal Shah, Vijay Shekhar Sharma of Paytm and Delhivery’s Mohit Tandon among others have invested in an upskilling and reskilling company Masai School.

The Bengaluru-based edtech company offers six to seven-month-long courses in full stack web development, android development, UI and UX etc to anyone who has passed class 12. The company also partners with tech companies for the placement of these students. Some of the founders who have invested in this round have also hired students from Masai School in the past.

Also see: Masai School acquires Banglore-based Design Shift Academy

Co-founder of Masai School, Prateek Shukla, said, “It is not a big funding amount that we have raised in this round. The idea here was to partner with top 20 tech entrepreneurs in the country and have these companies join Masai’s vision of building an outcome driven school.”

He added that the plan is to have 100 such tech entrepreneurs on its board in the next few months. Other angel investors who participated in this round are Amrish Rau of Pine Labs, Ankush Sachdeva, Bhanu Pratap Singh and Farid Ahsan of Sharechat, Amit Kumar Agarwal and Akhil Gupta of NoBroker, Vipin Pathak of Care24, Ramakant Sharma of LivSpace, Abhishek Goyal of Tracxn, Anurag Jain of KredX, Harsh Lunia of LendingKart, Sunil Rao of Amazon, Sharda Balaji of Novojuris and Kulin Shah of Onsurity among others.

Two-fold benefit

Shukla noted a two-fold benefit of having these tech entrepreneurs on the company’s board, one from the placement perspective where these tech founders understand the School mission and create a positive image for other companies who may hire Masai School graduates, and the other from the students’ perspective where the students get access to top tech company founders in the country.

The company reported touching $500,000 in monthly revenue last month and claims to be on track to make $1 million in monthly revenue by December 2021 or January 2022. Further, by March 2022, Masai School is aiming to have close to 10,000 students studying with the company across courses.

ISA model

Headquartered in Bengaluru, the company operates on an income share agreement (ISA) model, which means students do not have to pay an upfront fee for these courses. Graduates pay Masai School a share of their income once they have been hired at a threshold salary decided at the agreement stage.

At present, Masai School has graduated 400+ students across 14 batches, and claims to have a placement rate of over 92 per cent with an average CTC of ₹7.5 lakh per annum. The company has enabled student placements with more than 700 of its hiring partners, including companies such as NoBroker, ShareChat, Paytm, Samsung, Airmeet and Meesho among others. Masai School plans to launch data analytics, product management and other programs over the next few months. Over 2500 students study at Masai School at the moment.