Mindler, a comprehensive career guidance platform for students and educators has announced the acquisition of Immrse, a virtual career internship and simulation platform in a cash and stock deal.
With the acquisition. Immrse will be rebranded as Mindler Immrse and all team members of Immrse will join Mindler at the close of the acquisition.
Through this deal, Mindler will be focusing on making virtual career internships accessible to school and college students via schools/ institutions, career counsellors and EdTech partners.
Established in 2017 by an alumnus of Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, Immrse is a revolutionary platform that enables students to get virtual career internships through an experiential, immersive and self-paced career discovery program. It is a cross between an educational course, a role-playing game, masterclass and practical work experience. Virtual career internships allow students to deep dive into multiple conventional and new-age careers including Engineering, Medicine, Film Making, Graphic Designing, Law, Psychology, Ethical Hacking and more.
Immrse has already created an impact on over 10,000 students from classes 8-12 and has collaborated with over 100 counsellors and EdTech companies.
Commenting on the latest acquisition, Founder and CEO of Mindler, Prateek Bhargava, said, “We welcome team Immrse to the Mindler Family and are really excited to add this revolutionary product to our portfolio. Given the way the world of careers is being disrupted, internships and simulations are a very effective approach to empower students in making an informed career decision. Through our pilot project, we discovered that 98.7% of students found the experience really useful and we are excited to jointly build many more virtual career internships in the near future.”
As per NEP 2020, students in higher education should be provided internship opportunities and over 88% of Indian youth prefer to do internships as per India Skills Report 2020. Also, students below 18 are currently unable or find it difficult to do internships. Given that it’s critical that students take well-informed decisions towards their career, Virtual Career Internship is an innovative solution that enables students to take a scientific and well-established approach towards this conundrum.
Bhargava further added, “We are also stoked to tap the amazing opportunities which open up with this collaboration between Mindler and Immrse. With the progressive implementation of NEP, career guidance will become a key focal point for schools and institutions and we are building multiple innovative solutions towards empowering all our stakeholders. We are strongly positioned to deliver personalized career guidance solutions to students and aid their overall development through integrated co-curricular solutions – a key mandate of the New Education Policy.”
Along with Mindler’s existing portfolio of career discovery and planning tools which includes its revolutionary 5-dimensional career assessment, automated career activities and career planning tools and career coach led guidance for college discovery, planning and application; Immrse’s Virtual Career Internship will be a brilliant addition to create a comprehensive offering for students and all other stakeholders involved in the career planning journey of a student.
Founded in July 2015 by Prateek Bhargava, Mindler is a tech-enabled ecosystem for career planning and development for students. The Delhi-based startup aims to empower all stakeholders in the student career decision-making journey. Apart from a comprehensive career guidance platform for students, Midler also offers a SaaS platform for educators and EdTech partners to create their own career guidance ecosystem.
Founder of Immrse, Pratham Sutaria, has also responded to the development, saying “Immrse has created a one-of-its-kind experiential product to facilitate in-depth career exploration. This product encompasses new-age career simulations that help students understand career options practically before finalizing the right career for themselves. This product was built as a solution to the career decision-related problems and confusion that crores of students are facing in today’s era. We have been receiving overwhelming customer feedback and reviews from over 10,000 students who have experienced the product. Our completion rates are also significantly high compared to other self-paced ed-tech products. Joining the Mindler ecosystem will only help us accelerate growth. There are high synergies and we look forward to growing together with Mindler.”
The deal is likely to be closed in the next three months. Post the completion, Mindler will also aim to offer a wide range of practical programmes to students including corporate internship and experiential masterclass.
Earlier in September, Mindler raised $1.5 million in a Pre-Series A funding round led by HVB 88 Angels, Ecosystem Ventures, Inflection Point Ventures, nVentures Singapore and Chennai Angels. Prior to that, the company had raised $1 million in a pre-Series-A round led by Inflection Point Ventures, Taxmann Group and CIIE IIM Ahmedabad in January this year.