How NextLeap Building Job-Ready Talent For India’s Tech Economy

NextLeap, which was kickstarted in April 2021 with a team of 5, has focused on building its offerings keeping in mind how adults learn – a blend of hands-on and practical learning coupled with peer interaction and continued mentoring. This has led to over 1,000 success stories of its students landing jobs in roles across product management, UX design and data analytics

Witnessing the struggle to hire qualified talent at Flipkart and Myntra, former executives Mohammad Yasir (CTO) and Arindam Mukherjee (CEO) teamed up to create NextLeap. Their motivation stemmed from a clear disconnect: traditional education wasn't equipping even top graduates with the necessary skills for modern tech roles such as product management, UX design, data science, and mobile engineering – a significant hurdle for India's economic advancement.

Learning is not a product of the teaching, it is a product of the activity of the learners. Traditional ed-tech has largely focused on delivering theoretical knowledge via curated content. But, unfortunately the outcomes produced by most of these ed-tech companies have been limited because of the lack of focus on learning experiences and the learners’ activity.

NextLeap, which was kickstarted in April 2021 with a team of 5, has focused on building its offerings keeping in mind how adults learn – a blend of hands-on and practical learning coupled with peer interaction and continued mentoring. This has led to over 1,000 success stories of its students landing jobs in roles across product management, UX design and data analytics. It is currently still a lean team of 10 even after crossing more than 15,000 enrolled learners since 2021.

Talking to Bizz Buzz, Arindam Mukherjee, Co-founder and CEO of NextLeap, said, “Our success mantra is an obsessive focus on learning outcomes for our students and maintaining fiscal discipline while growing the organisation.”

We raised our seed round of $2 million in 2021 from Mukesh Bansal (Co-Founder of Myntra and Cult.fit), Infoedge Ventures and angels like Kalyan Krishnamurthy (CEO, Flipkart Group), Kunal Shah (CEO, CRED) and Amar Nagaram (CEO, Virgio), he added.

Today, AI is embedded within the learning experience at NextLeap allowing us to move closer towards personalised learning. For example, you can test your understanding of concepts with an AI tutor, debug your code with help from our AI Coding CoPilot, improve your resume with our AI resume analyser and practice mock interviews with our AI interviewer. On top of that, we use AI to gather insights about the learners' activities and where they might be struggling – this helps us to improve our learning experience even further. Lastly, a lot of the operational tasks like personalised learner communications are automated and this has enabled us to operate with a lean team.

First, a customer first mindset is critical to achieving brand love. Second, for a country of India’s scale, to have a meaningful impact, you need to keep affordability at the core of your offering. Having spent a significant part of our careers in Flipkart/Myntra, we strongly believe in these two and have built NextLeap on similar lines. Our learning experiences are designed keeping the outcomes in mind and our courses are 10 times more affordable than others in the market. We are focused on expanding our reach – both in terms of new courses and new customer segments. Our recent acquisition of PM School is aligned with this approach, he said.