Online skill assessment platform Mettl raises $4M in Series A from IndoUS Venture Partners, existing investors

Mettl an online skill assessment platform has received $4 million in funding in its Series A round led by IndoUS Venture Partners and its existing investors. As part of the transaction, Vani Kola, MD, IndoUS Venture Partners, will join the board of the startup.

The startup had earlier raised angel rounds from Blume Ventures and other investors like Sasha Mirchandani, Puranjaya Singh, Sunil Sharma and Naveen Tewari.

Ketan Kapoor, co-founder and CEO, Mettl, said, "While our platform is also valid for the Indian market, what we are developing is for the global market. And the kind of investments required for creating a product on that scale and for that audience is on a different level altogether, hence raising a new round became a necessity for us."

"A large part of the funds (around 60 per cent) will be used for product development since we are planning to expand across industries (like finance, education, publishing, healthcare, etc.). We will also spend on our sales and marketing efforts," he added.

Founded in 2010 by Kapoor, an IIT Rourkee and IIM-Kolkata alumnus, and Tonmoy Shingal, an IIT Kanpur and IIM-Bangalore product, Mettl is an assessment platform to measure, analyse and improve professional skills across multiple industries. The assessment platform is primarily used for screening pre-hires for recruitments (both entry level and experienced profiles) and for employees for competency tracking/ training across aptitude, personality and technical aspects.

In addition, job portals, education companies, large publishers, colleges/institutions and training/skill improvement companies are also using Mettl for their business needs. The startup's clientele includes large IT services companies as well as young product companies and startups like Cleartrip.com, Monster.com, InMobi, Comviva, The Times Group, Myntra.com and iXiGO, among others.

"Mettl is scalable and applicable for global companies. It is poised to become a global player and continue to expand the use cases of their strong proprietary technology to multiple business applications," said Kola.

Headquartered in Gurgaon, the startup also has offices in Pune and Bangalore. The team size is 30 as of now and the company plans to spend more on talent acquisition. The company is also planning geographical expansion and for the same it will open a new office in Singapore next month that will cater to the South-East Asian market, which will be followed by a US office by the end of this year.

Shingal, co-founder and COO, Mettl, said "Our focus is to measure skills accurately in the way they should be measured; but we are also working to make it easier and hassle free to create, manage and conduct assessments." The startup is also developing an automatic invigilation technology that can do away with the need to have manual proctoring even for large high stakes assessments.

As of now, the company has over 50 paying clients while a number of companies are experimenting with the platform. The company claims to have witnessed a 10x growth in the last year and is aiming to repeat the same this year as well.

The company's new products include an assessment platform focused on the education industry called Math.Mettl (still in the development phase as of now) and a psychometric assessment software that can measure personality, stress, motivation, cognitive ability, leadership and management potential.

Mettl also happens to be a Techcircle Fastracker 2012. Read more on it here.

(Edited by Prem Udayabhanu)

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