Exclusive Interview with Akshay Chaturvedi, Founder and CEO, Leverage Edu

Education technology has a huge demand in this digitalization era for effective online learning as well as a better choice for selecting the perfect educational institutions to pursue professional careers. Cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence and IoT have created ample opportunities for students to explore new streams and courses to chase their dreams.

Here is an exclusive interview with Akshay Chaturvedi, Founder and CEO, Leverage Edu, who elaborates the functions of the company through its own transparent and technological platform that helps students complete the whole process of getting admissions to their favorable universities seamlessly.

1. Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers/Please brief us about the products/services/solutions you provide to your customers and how do they get value out of it.

Leverage Edu is one of a kind 'study abroad' platform where it helps students explore their choices and guide them to take up courses that interest them. The team helps students choose the right course in the right university. These courses include conventional choices like medicine, engineering, MBA, and data sciences as well as a variety of unconventional course choices like sports management, culinary arts, or winemaking.

Today, brick-and-mortar players work with a "push mindset", taking upfront cash from the student or a portion of what the student has saved for their university fee. That is neither ideal nor good for the student. This process had to be revamped with transparency, technology, and the right ethics— a true student-first approach!

Manual email-based processes for university selection, application, and tracking invite human errors in the process and the student cannot risk this happening in what is a career-defining phase of life for him/her. As the leading tech-driven university admissions platform, this company offers seamless solutions for students in their entire study abroad process starting from multiple workshops to identify the right course and country, tracking their applications, engaging in personalized sessions, helping find the right-fit university, enabling maximum scholarships, as well as making available value-added services like education loan, accommodation, forex, and so on.

The student gets an opportunity to match to universities that are the right fit for them and then directly speak to them on a virtual university fair platform known as unconnected, which is also helping universities find talent that is right for them and can excel in their programs. All this brings together a unique process that is unbiased, reliable, and efficient, making sure that every student can punch above their weight!

2. With what mission and objectives, the company was set up? In short, tell us about your journey since the inception of the company?

I drew inspiration from my own story. My parents moved from a Tier-2 city in Uttar Pradesh to New Delhi. This vital change upgraded the family's life and consequently my life with access to better opportunities. At 18, I worked with AIESEC, to help hundreds of students move across geographies for volunteering and internship options. The foundation for the concept of "talent mobility" was thus laid right out from the start. At ISB, in 2014, where I was the Director of the Student Body, I also got a chance to operate as an institution to drive student recruitment across India and abroad— finally culminated into "Leverage" as a mini-project, later becoming a company in 2017. That's how Leverage Edu started, and the mission has remained the same— to uplift students by helping them with access to quality higher education and education destinations where their talent will be rewarded and will open doors for them leading to best-suited employment. This thus causes a gradual upliftment of not just the student's life but their family's as well.

3. Brief us about the proactive Founder/CEO of the company and his/her contributions towards the company and the industry.

Founded in 2017, Leverage Edu's mission is to help each individual realize their potential, independent of their backgrounds or birthplace. They enable this by helping you navigate the pathway that will unlock talents, and enhance skills. Traditionally the ideal pathway has been through admission to a dream international college. And thus Leverage Edu has chosen to help its customers get into the international college of their choice, thereby kick-starting them on the path to realize their potential.

As a consumer tech company that is helping students in over 100 towns and cities today, LeverageEdu strongly believes in "democratizing access to opportunities" that gives students from Gurdaspur, Ernakulum, Pune, Vijaywada, Bareilly, Surat, and Kainthal— a deep-pedagogy mentorship that can help level up their and their family's lives for the better, forever.

Being a Forbes 30 under 30 Asia and India Awardee, I lead a team of more than 200 spirited individuals spread across the nation. I am a Draper University Alum and was selected as a part of the Prime Minister's Champions of Change in 2016. I have worked across multiple spokes of the business/tech ecosystem in the last decade with strong views on the democratization of education, careers, and mentorship, and am one-pointed in the mission of being able to transform the lives of millions of families by doing that.

4. Tell us how your company is leveraging technologies like in the IoT/AI/big data analytics/robotics/self-driving vehicles/cloud computing

Students sign up on the Leverage Edu platform and use the AI Course Finder to have systems answer to which university or program is suited to their background and interest. Thereafter, students fill in their details on 'OneView Portal' that allows access to coaches and mentors who would guide them. This includes academic and professional details with essential application-related documents at a later stage. On the basis of the shared data, the team helps students find their right course by matching their skill set.

5. Kindly mention some of the major challenges the company has faced till now. What is your biggest USP that differentiates the company from competitors?

On the LeverageEdu.com platform, the entire journey of the student is productized starting from the shortlisting of the program and university using the AI Course Finder. Our company is today in the middle of extending this feature to include their path matched down to employment options because it believes "that" is the outcome is needed to win against.

The platform that helps students undergo multiple workshops, track their applications, engage in user sessions, access value-added services like education loans, accommodation, and a lot of other things, is seamlessly integrated on the OneView Portal. The student gets an opportunity to match to universities that could be the right fit for them and then directly speak to them on the virtual university fair platform known as uniconnect. This platform is also helping universities find talent who can excel in their programs. All this brings together a unique process that is unbiased, reliable, and efficient, ensuring every student excels and lives out the dream of being able to study what they are right for, to get into a profession that will truly give them success and joy.

6. What are the most important technology trends that you see emerging across the globe?

I feel that the tops technology trends are artificial intelligence and machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT),  wearables, augmented humans,  big data, augmented analytics,  intelligent spaces, blockchain, cloud voice interfaces, chatbots, and much more.

7. How do you see the company and the industry in the future ahead? What are your growth plans for the next 12 months? 

I believe that this is a question better answered by investors and market experts, and I am clearly not qualified to comment on it. The company is laser-focused on just growing the business and serving happy students. It has operations in more than 40 Indian towns and cities today and over half of the students come from non-metro areas. The intention is to go much deeper than this and set larger outposts in Punjab, Andhra, and Kerala region, which will allow the team to bring in regional specialization.