Iceland Venture Studio invested in Expertrons an A.I. Video Bot technology company that helps students get counseling and mentoring from experienced mentors to land their dream job. This is Iceland Venture Studio’s first investment in an Indian Startup. The startup came out of stealth mode yesterday. I am really excited about this company and the technology platform that they are building.
Jatin and Vivek are second time founders and I was very impressed with their mission to empower students from any university to tap into the experience and insight of mentors. Jatin and Vivek went to IIT Mumbai one of the premier institutes for technology and engineering. They successfully built and excited from their previous EdTech startups and they had created a syndicate of top angel and venture investors from India to participate in their Seed round when they reached out to IVS. We are excited to join this journey with them. Video Bot technology has huge potential and allows for incredible scaling ask the founders of YouTube or TikTok or Zoom.
IVS investment thesis is decentralization and democratization of data, algorithms and technology. Expertrons falls right into the middle of that. There are 300,000 engineering students who graduate every year in India and all of them would like to work for Google or Microsoft or Apple or Amazon etc but access to knowledge on how to get a job with these companies is still a mystery. What if you could connect with someone who has similar background as you and has successfully landed a job in any of those companies? what if you could ask them questions on how they landed their job? The real challenge is how do you scale those mentors?
The standard model is you somehow get connected with that individual through the existing social networks but how can you get that mentor to engage? The challenges that Expertrons is solving are real problems faced by students. The access to mentor and knowledge networks is still not democratized. Even if you are able to get the access to those networks, being able to actually tap into the wisdom of those in the mentor network is an even harder problem. I have seen this personally with access to investors and mentors for startups. This was the main reason I founded Startup Iceland so anyone can get access to one-on-one mentoring session with any of the speakers who participate in the event. The success of accelerators like YC and Techstars is testament to the fact that if you have access to good investor and mentor network experienced in investing and building startups then you reduce the odds of failure of your startup. I believe that video bot technology can unleash and democratize the knowledge and wisdom of mentors to those who aspire to succeed.
