Venture capital firm Matrix Partners has led a fresh funding round for an undisclosed sum in education technology startup Pesto, which runs a career accelerator for software engineering talent in the country, the investor said in a statement.
Sriharsha Majety, Rahul Jaimani and Nandan Reddy, founders of online food delivery startup Swiggy; Dr Ritesh Malik, founder of co-working space provider Innov8; and Ashish Tulsian, founder of restaurant software management firm POSist are among other angel investors that also put in money into the startup, the statement added.
Founded by Ayush Jaiswal and Andrew Linfoot in March 2017, Pesto’s 12-week intensive training programme helps software engineers break into international technology careers via full-time remote jobs.
“There’s a severe shortage of tech talent in certain parts of the world (US, Canada, Europe, etc.) and we believe that India has a large number of undiscovered tech talent that can fill this gap,” said Jaiswal in the statement.
The company takes a fixed percentage of the engineer’s salary for the next three years through an income share agreement. Currently, it is starting a batch every month and accepts students on a rolling basis.
“Remote work is an early trend globally driven by a shortage of high-quality local talent, rising cost of living in key technology hubs and widespread adoption of enabling infrastructure such as co-working and collaboration tools," said Rajat Agarwal, vice president at Matrix Partners.
Matrix Partners
Incorporated in 2006, the investment firm has over the years evolved from a quasi-private-equity investor to a conventional venture capital firm that primarily focuses on tech startups. It recently closed fundraising for its third fund.
Matrix has so far backed more than 60 companies including cab-hailing firm Ola, mobile payment services company Mswipe, digital healthcare venture Practo and social commerce platform Limeroad.
