Offline-first tech skilling and placement for India
How did your company get started? (i.e., How did the founders meet? How did you come up with the idea? How did you decide to be a founder?)
AccioJob was founded in 2018 by Vishu Bansal, Harsh Sharma, Priyanshu Agarwal and Yashwardhan Burad, four IIT Delhi alumni.
All the founders were batchmates and friends from college since 2013.
We were passionate about solving for employability for Indian college graduates. Spent the first couple of years iterating in this space from selling software solutions to colleges to B2B training products to reaching product market fit with B2C online and offline upskilling programs.
Before starting up, founders were active in the higher education market, speaking at events, exhibitions, conferences and guiding students making critical career decisions. Felt strongly about the problem at hand and enjoyed the journey of creating something valuable for people.
What's the history of your company from getting started until the present day? What were the big inflection points?
AccioJob was founded in 2018 by four IIT Delhi alumni and joined Y Combinator in W19 batch.
2024 - the offline decision. We moved from online only courses to offline centres enabling in person interaction, distraction free learning.
March, 2024 - first skill centre, Noida. Learnt running an offline business. Refined pedagogies, build BTL GTM funnels, strengthened employer partnerships, made the centre run profitably in the first 8 months.
November, 2024 - October, 2025 expansion. Skill centres in Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai, each near a live tech hiring market rather than in a metro centre for its own sake.
Today. Three programmes — Data Analytics with Gen AI, AI Engineering with Full Stack, and Data Science and AI — with 2,000+ students placed across 500+ hiring partners.
What is the core problem you are solving? Why is this a big problem? What made you decide to work on it?
India graduates over a million engineers a year, and most of them never get a fair shot at a tech job. The gap is rarely ability - it's structured practice, real feedback, and access to companies that are actually hiring.
Online courses didn't close that gap. Completion rates for self-paced programmes sit in the single digits, because a 21-year-old sitting alone with video lectures has no accountability, no peers, and nobody to ask when they're stuck at 11pm on a bug. The students who most need the training are the ones least served by a format that assumes they'll self-motivate through eight months of it.
So we built the opposite. AccioJob runs in-person skill centres where students show up daily, learn alongside a cohort, and get corrected by mentors in the room, delivering 2x better learning and placement outcomes. We then run the hiring side ourselves: 50+ hiring drives a month across 500+ partner companies, so the training connects to an actual interview rather than a certificate.
What is your long-term vision? If you truly succeed, what will be different about the world?
If we succeed, where you studied stops determining whether you get a shot at a tech career.
We believe strongly about the idea that employability will shift towards skills over degrees, towards capability instead of credentials. AI adoption in every domain of work will need human talent to be upskilled and reskilled. That’s the opportunity we are building for.
Every learner would think of AccioJob Skill centres as trusted institutions in their city which could help them with career guidance, personalising their roadmap, industry relevant actionable mentorship, being part of a professional community, structured upskilling programs, employment opportunities.
Concretely, that means skill centres in every Indian city with a tech hiring market, not just the four we run today, and a placement record that companies trust enough to hire from without a separate screening round.
