This Hyderabad-based firm turning alumni networks into gold for colleges & corporates

The biggest mistake that colleges make is thinking that building alumni relation is an option only. What they do not realise is that alumni’s are brand ambassadors driving customer feedback, says Paresh Masade, Founder and CEO, Vaave, a SaaS platform for alumni engagement and relations. The Hyderabad-based startup is globally ranked number one across alumni software space. Through alumni’s, as the most important channel, Vaave influences the placement and admissions at colleges. In an interview with Bizz Buzz, Paresh sheds light on how Vaave empowers institutions and corporations to leverage the power of their alumni networks, driving better placements, admissions, and talent acquisition

What are institutions missing out in the absence of an active alumni engagement platform?

Opportunity… When a placement officer from a college goes to a company looking to invite them for placements at their institution, and if alumni from that college are working for that company, then the HR would first approach the alumni for feedback about the college. If the alumni give indifferent responses, then the college will lose an opportunity to get the company for campus recruitment. Same is for admissions where students seeking admission in a college will check with the alumni, and if the response is not on par of expectations then the college will lose an opportunity to attract good talent.

How did the idea of starting Vaave come up?

I studied from a school in Adilabad. I was a student entrepreneur from school days itself. I was into building websites. During the days of Orkut, I launched a website for my school. We felt while many of our seniors were studying abroad, we could get them together as their contribution could elevate the school’s performance. The website created the buzz as many seniors studying in the US reconnected. This is how the idea started. After graduating from Indra Reddy College in Hyderabad, I went to Mumbai for pursuing Master’s at IIM. One of the drastic differences I witnessed was the kind of alumni engagement students had, while back in Hyderabad after graduating a student ends up taking a course at Ameerpet to get a job. At IIM Mumbai the engagement culture amongst students was different, we had alumni’s coming in atleast once every week. They used to tell us about what is happening in the industry. This is how Vaave got its beginning and my startup Coherendz India Pvt Ltd was registered. After completing Masters in 2009, the year of recession, instead of opting for a job I decided to return to Hyderabad.

What were the teething problems you had to face?

At 23, I launched the startup completely bootstrapped, I admit that I didn’t know lot of things. Initially I was offering IT services. In 2014, I pivoted to product as the focus was always on developing a platform for alumni relation. As services was eating away lot of our time and as we wanted to scale our product we had to pivot. We faced few challenges like managing funds and building the team. The market was not great back then. The traction we have been able to see is only in the last five to six years. We got our first funding in 2014 from an accelerator fund, they were more of mentors than investors who helped us with… how to look at the market, build the product and so on. As this is a new industry which did not exist earlier in India, it took us time to understand the market dynamics.

What are the features of Vaave?

While in the US, endowments run in billions for alumni relations even now in India institutions are not aware about the power of alumni engagement. We started with an alumni SaaS platform which is like a LinkedIn for colleges, here they can search where their alumni is working, and so on. Apart from this, alumni can hold discussions, message each other, create groups, colleges can raise funds, organise events, collect payments, alumni can post jobs, internships for the current students. Over a period of time, we built up our expertise. We have a service called as Alumni Leadership programme wherein we train alumni officers on how to manage alumni relations. We introduced this service now after learning the needs and demands of the institutions. We offer full stack software alongside the engagement and ecosystem required to run a successful alumni relation.

What are the features, beyond alumni engagement, available on Vaave?

Mentoring… there are three stages of mentoring. Firstly, most of the students do not know what to do or take up, for that colleges hold mentor talks. Alumni hold seminars, sessions and guest lecture to tell the student on how work life at a particular company would be. What we do is after the student filters down on an organisation, alumni tell mentee through a structured process, on how the student should build a profile to get into that company. After which follows presentation, as students might be good at projects but when it comes to presenting it many fail. We have a mentoring platform where the student submits their resume and the alumni give their feedback. The student then makes the correction and uploads it. This can be done for prepping for interviews too. The impact that we have created is that students are able to achieve industry standard resumes after receiving feedback from alumni’s as their mentors.

How many institutions are subscribed on Vaave?

We have over 1,000 institutions such as nine IIMs, five IITs, 11 NITs, IIIT-Hyderabad and Bangalore, Universities like Symbiosis, and many others across 21 countries, subscribed to our platform. Vaave has presence in Qatar, Malaysia, Australia, Middle East, Japan among other countries. We have captured all of the top colleges, now we are looking at reaching out to the second layer of colleges. We do have 50 per cent of institutions from tier-2. Top 10 per cent of students of every college including the tier-2s are doing well. We have schools like DPS for their grade 10 of alumni student network, then we have colleges, and universities with courses in engineering, management, pharma, agriculture, and from other streams, medical colleges are lesser comparatively. The college officially onboards our platform and then sends out invites to alumni and current students to join.

Why did Vaave launch alumni engagement for corporates?

In 2019 when one of our companies was looking out for an alumni platform they reached out to us for building SaaS for corporates. We have 25 companies utilising our platform, including Tata Steel, Bosch, Saint Gobain, for their former employees. The service they seek is exit experience. Through our platform, former employees can seamlessly receive their pay slips or other such documents. The second service is Boomerang AI used for tapping alumni talent. When a former employee wants to return after a period, Boomerang AI matches job listings for them. This saves the corporates’ time and money in orientation, and training that is carried out for new hires. This year itself we added 13 corporates.

What is the subscription model for institutions and corporates?

The annual subscription fee starts from Rs 40,000 for institutions. We offer discounted fee for government colleges. For universities, our SaaS platform costs around Rs 2.50 lakh for a year depending on the services they opt for. Our regular ticket size is around Rs 60,000 to Rs 70,000. These institutions initially use our platform for getting their alumni back, later they tap into our services such as outreach or mentoring programme. For corporates, the subscription fee ranges from Rs 8 to 10 lakh for a year. For a company size of around 500 employees, the subscription fee is around Rs 2.50 lakh.

How has Vaave leveraged artificial intelligence?

In the last six to eight months, we have been investing hugely on artificial intelligence. We have eased the process of search for alumni. One does not have to sign into the platform. They can drop their resume and the profile gets built up. A link can be circulated on WhatsApp groups, asking them to drop their resume and get their profile created. This is an AI-based engine we have built. Pain point for every college is that they want to know how many of their alumni are entrepreneurs, how many are CXOs, which countries they studied in, as for these colleges career progression is an important criterion for higher NAAC grade. We have beta launched this feature. Our AI engine will tag that alumni accordingly as entrepreneurs, studied abroad, etc. Another feature is that, students can scan our QR code to drop their resume. They do not have to physically register at events. Also students can search for their alumni on WhatsApp directly instead of going to the portal.

What are your expansion plans for this year?

Our office is at IIIT Hyderabad campus. Currently we are a team of 70 employees. Over the last six years, I have raised Rs 3 crore, which includes the amount funded by my alumni network, besides being bootstrapped to a larger extent. We have been operationally profitable from the last three years and we are growing at 30 to 40 per cent y-o-y. We are in the process of raising funds in pre-Series A round in the next few months. We will be utilising the funds for scaling up, onboarding tier-2 colleges on freemium model. Currently we are adding 10 to 15 institutions a month, so we will be adding another 300 institutions and 25 corporates this calendar year.