Cloud technology companies are facing a significant shortage of cloud skills, making it difficult to hire and difficult to ensure that the skills of their current workforce are up to date. Australia and US-based Saasguru aims to bridge the gap with an edtech platform designed for recent graduates and tech workers who want to get better at using cloud platforms like Salesforce or AWS. The company announced today that it has raised a $4 million AUD (or approximately $2.7 million USD) seed round led by Square Peg Capital, along with returning investors Black Nova and Antler.
Saasguru’s last funding was nine months ago when it raised a $1.3 million AUD pre-seed round. The company was founded in 2021 by Amit Choudhary, Atif Saad and Prateek Kataria. Choudhary and Saad sold their latest startup SaaSfocus, a Salesforce consultancy to Cognizant in 2018.
To date, Salesguru has been used by 40,000 students in 20 countries and has partnered with 20 cloud consulting firms looking to train new hires and refresh the skills of their existing teams. The students range from recent graduates starting their first job in cloud technology to professionals looking to earn more training certifications.
The search for people with cloud computing skills in the Asia Pacific region is urgent a report from AWS showing that the workforce needed will triple by 2025, from 37 million workers in 2020 to 109 million. Saasguru aims to help its students get ready for cloud technology jobs while creating more talent at scale.
Saasguru founders Atif Saad, Amit Choudhary and Prateek Kataria
Choudhary told businessroundups.org that the idea for Saasguru was planted while he and Saad were still working on SaaSfocus and struggling to compete for talent with major cloud consultancies.
“This forced us to look at organic talent creation by hiring people from diverse non-tech backgrounds and upskilling them through a homegrown program tailored for Salesforce job readiness,” he said. “This became a bit of a ‘secret sauce’ for us and it helped us scale the business to over 360 consultants, over 80% of whom were trained through this program.”
SaaSfocus’ training program included highly personalized study plans, “TikTok-like” content micromodules, mentoring, peer-to-peer learning, and hands-on assignments.
After selling SaaSfocus, Choudhary and Saad used this approach in a pro-bono program to help people find new jobs during COVID by teaching them Salesforce skills. Of the 50 people who participated in the program, nearly all were placed in Salesforce-related jobs.
“It was the moment we realized that this could be scaled to a global enterprise with technology,” Choudhary said. Saasguru was launched in early 2021 and combined the components of the pro bono program with a deep tech platform.
Saasguru’s 15 programs include programs for learning from Salesforce, ServiceNow, AWS, GCP, and Azure. It plans to use its funding to add more cloud certifications. Choudhary said Saasguru personalizes courses, which can take 30 hours for a self-paced cloud certification program to 300 hours for a career boot camp, using a two-step process. The first step is an initial assessment that analyzes a learner’s readiness and creates a learning path for them. Then when they start taking a course, the platform recommends the next best step.
Saasguru gains customers by conducting free webinars with its teachers or gurus. They also offer free one-on-one mentoring sessions on careers, interview tips and certifications, and run a Slack community. Saasguru serves both individuals and cloud consultancies looking to build the skills of new and existing employees.
In a statement on the funding, Lucy Tan, director of Square Peg Capital, said: “There is a massive cloud skills shortage in the industry, which is slowing down companies’ digital transformation initiatives. Universities are not well equipped to solve this skills shortage because skills are updated so quickly. This means post-graduate training is critical to continued business growth and Saasguru offers a personalized learning path for cloud professionals to get started, becoming proficient and certified in cloud technologies. This can have a meaningful impact on people’s lives, whether they’re moving into a new career or receiving pay raises.”
