Career accelerator Pesto raises Rs 13.8 Cr in seed funding led by matrix partners

Key Highlights

Pesto which is a Gurgaon headquartered career accelerator dealing with software engineers has raised a seed funding of Rs 13.8 Cr.

This funding round was led by matrix partners.

The company plans on using the raised capital for expanding their services and also for opening new training centres in various cities.

Pesto which is a Gurgaon headquartered career accelerator dealing with software engineers has raised a seed funding of Rs 13.8 Cr. This funding round was led by matrix partners. Other investors include Swiggy founders Sriharsha Majety, Nandan Reddy and Rahul Jaimani as well as Ritesh Malik, the founder of Innov8. Apart from them, there were other participants of the funding round such as Posist founder Ashish Tulsian and OIC capital’s Jack Yeung.

The company plans on using the raised capital for expanding their services and also for opening new training centres in various cities.

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Pesto was started 9 months ago by Ayush Jaiswal and Andrew Linfoot with the aim of providing world-class intensive training to Indian software engineers so that they can successfully be integrated with companies based in the US and thus have the potential to earn more. The company seeks to open more doors career-wise to the top engineering talent in the country. Currently, more than half a million jobs are available in the field of software engineering in the US alone with the numbers estimated to grow to 1.4 million by 2020. Also, there are about 5 Millon software engineers working in India. However, the irony is that the pay scale of Indian engineers is extremely screwed up. In the US, a typical engineer makes up to $150 per hour. On the contrary, Indian engineers are only earning a meagre $6,600 at the entry level. This had led to many US companies outsourcing their jobs to India at a much cheaper cost.

Jaiswal felt that it was unfair that Indian engineers only made 10% the amount of money made by a US engineer for the same amount of work. Thus instead of keeping employees on a payroll, Pesto aimed at training them and connecting them to US-based companies on the basis of income sharing agreements.

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Currently, Pesto offers an intensive training of 12 weeks to the software engineering talent and helps them connect with international jobs with an estimated 6x increase in their pay scale. The company wants to build a marketplace for software engineering talent from India and invest in their skilling led approach. This training helps to bridge the gap between the culture of India and America. It also teaches the employees soft skills such as time management and better communication. Pesto also has mentors aboard who have experience of working with top IT firms in the US including Tesla, Facebook, and Twitter etc. The company also helps employees who want to switch to other firms or take on new roles.

Pesto also partners with tech companies that are looking to hire engineering talent which include Clipboard health and Jumpcut. More such partnerships are expected in the near future.

The start-up takes up to 17% of the total salary of the placed engineer for 3 years if the base salary exceeds 15 lakhs per annum. Most of the engineers placed by pesto have landed themselves job offers that pay them INR 35 lakh per annum. Since its inception, Pesto has helped in placing 9 students with packages of INR 2.8 Cr combined.

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