-Paromita Sengupta (Bengaluru)

Karun Tadepalli is the Hyderabad and Dallas, Texas (USA)-based CEO and co-founder of byteXL India Pvt. Ltd (estb.2020, headcount: 125). The company has developed an edtech platform that offers second, third and final year engineering undergrads self-learning courseware and guided training programmes in emerging technologies (Devops, Cloud Computing, Cyber Security, AI, ML, and Fullstack Development), to boost their employability in the booming ICT (information communication technologies) industry.

In the past two years since it was promoted, byteXL has partnered with 85 engineering colleges across Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Maharashtra, Delhi NCR, and Punjab to upskill 100,000 students.

Newspeg. On July 25, the company made its foray into Gujarat by inking a partnership agreement with Parul University, Vadodara, to skill 10,000 students.

History. An engineering and business management alum of Gannon (Pennsylvania) and Texas universities, Tadepalli worked for 19 years with blue-chip companies (Accenture, Health Management Systems, AT & T) in the US before deciding to go solo and transnational with the mission “to bridge the huge academia-industry skills gap” that he discerned while working in industry. Together with brother Sricharan, Tadepalli invested his savings to co-promote byteXL India Pvt. Ltd in 2020. To fund its mission, last year byteXL successfully raised $250,000 by way of seed capital from a group of angel investors led by the US-based Joy Family Investment.

Direct talk. “Our USP (unique sales proposition) is not just our curriculum and mode of delivery, but also our unique student-centred digital platform. The proprietary analytics of byteXL enables instant assessment to ascertain students’ weak learning areas and enables them to catch up. We offer two programmes — Expert and Career Accelerator. Both include 160 hours of instructor-led training per year and 120 hours of platform engagement through prescribed reading material, recorded videos, coding challenges and assessments supplemented with soft skills development to boost students’ employability quotient. Within two years, we have enabled placement of 10,000 students in blue-chip companies,” says Tadepalli with evident satisfaction.

Future plans. With the company having got off to a smooth start, Tadepalli has ambitious expansion plans. “In 2022, we intend to partner with an additional 150 engineering colleges to upskill 240,000 students. Having established partnerships in Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu are our next target states. Currently, our focus is on engineering colleges but going forward, we may extend our services to arts, science and commerce colleges as well. As we scale, we intend to disrupt the market with learning, skilling, placements, and emerge as strong players in upskilling students in higher education to reduce high employee induction and training costs of India Inc,” says Tadepalli.

Wind in your sails!

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