Startup Circle: How is Leverage Edu easing students' way into international colleges?

Founded in 2017, by Akshay Chaturvedi, Leverage Edu’s mission is to help each of us realise our potential; independent of our backgrounds or birthplace. They enable this by helping you navigate the pathway that will unlock talents, and enhance skills. Traditionally the ideal pathway has been through admission to a dream international college. Thus, Leverage Edu has chosen to help its customers get into the international college of their choice; thereby kickstarting them on the path to realise their potential.

As a consumer tech company, it is helping students in over 100 towns and cities today. LeverageEdu strongly believes in “democratising access to opportunities”. It is giving students from Gurdaspur, Ernakulum, Pune, Vijaywada, Bareilly, Surat, Kainthal - a far deep-pedagogy mentorship. This can help these students level up their and their family’s lives for the better, forever, the founder states.

Akshay Chaturvedi, a Forbes 30Under30 Asia and India Awardee, leads a team of more than 200 spirited individuals spread across the nation. He is a DraperU Alum and was selected as a part of the Prime Minister’s Champions of Change in 2016. He has worked across multiple spokes of the business/tech ecosystem in the last decade. With strong views on the democratisation of education, careers, and mentorship, his mission is to transform millions of families’ lives.

The idea behind starting Leverage Edu

Akshay drew inspiration from his own story where his parents moved from a Tier 2 city in Uttar Pradesh to New Delhi, and that upgraded his and his family’s life with access to better opportunities. At 18, he worked with AIESEC, to help hundreds of students move across geographies for volunteering and internship options. The lens of “talent mobility” was hence built right out from the start.  At ISB, in 2014, Akshay was Director of the Student Body. Here, he also got a chance to operate as an institution to drive student recruitment across India and abroad. This finally culminated into Leverage as a mini-project, later becoming a company in 2017.

“That’s how Leverage Edu started. The mission has remained the same - to uplift students by helping them with access to quality higher education and education destinations where their talent will be rewarded and will open doors for them leading to best-suited employment. This, thus, causes a gradual upliftment of not just the student’s life but also their family’s!” states Akshay.

Excerpts from the QnA.

How are you helping Indian Students to move abroad for higher education? What makes them different from exciting players?

On the platform, we productise the entire journey of the student from the shortlisting of program and university using our AI Course-finder. We are today in the middle of extending this feature to also include their path matching down to employment options - because we believe “that” is the outcome we need to win against. The platform helps students undergo multiple workshops, track their applications, engage in sessions, access value-added services like education loan, accommodation - and a lot of other things, seamlessly integrated on our OneViewPortal.

The student gets an opportunity to match to Universities that could be the right fit for them. They can, then, directly speak to them on our VirtualUniversity Fair Platform - Uniconnect. Uniconnect is also helping Universities find talent that can excel in their programs. All this brings together a unique process that is unbiased, reliable and efficient, ensuring every student can punch above their weight and live out the dream of being able to study what they are right for, to get into a profession that will truly give them success and joy.

What are your plans for 2021?

We have operations in 40+ Indian towns and cities today, and over half of our students come from non-metro areas. The intention is to go much deeper than this and set larger outposts in Punjab, Andhra and Kerala region, which will allow us to bring in regional specialisation.

About Funding

We have raised 60 crores in series funding from Tomorrow Capital, Blume Ventures and DSG Consumer Partners. Besides these, we have the backing of some of the most renowned individual investors from the world over.