Presenting our startttttup – IYS Skills Tech, a skills analytics company – for crowdfunding. We are a starttttttup because we started long time back. In 2010 we incorporated. Is there an age after which startups cannot be cannot be called startups? From another perspective, we are still a startup – we have not still gone through the crucial cycles of business. So far we have completed only two – first, product research and development and second, validation of the product and business idea. We are just entering the crucial phase of customer acquisition.

We should have completed our development and gone to the market much earlier and seen verdict of the user – Pass or Fail much earlier. (In fact, Rupa my wife agreed in May 2018 to marry me, though I was making no money, only because I told her that in my calculation we would be ready and be making good money from Sep 2018. Three year hence, situations has not changed. We laugh thinking of that 🙂 The problem that we are trying to crack is complex. Every time we thought we are there, we would realize issues. And the solution is not such that we release a segment or part of it and keep tinkering and improving.

It is for this critical phase we are seeking to raise funds. VC/PE/Angels will, in my little experience and understanding shoo us off, given that our age + very little traction. (We are very clear though why we took so much time).

So, let me tell you what IYS does

The fundamental belief of IYS is that we need standardization, normalization, comprehensiveness etc. of “skills”. We need better quality data on skills – skills of people and and that of jobs. Only if we have that and then perform analytics with them will we be able to bring improvements to issues in the Human Capital space. (Btw, Skills is the currency of Human Capital). Read more about the need for quality of skills data, issues with skills data and how IYS tries to address these issues. There are two other taxonomies on skills in the public – ONet or the US govt and ESCO of the EU – both good initiatives but with serious limitations.

My dream is of a report card for each and every individuals and job. Report card like the ones we have in schools. Report cards are super data template. It is common template for all students in all classes. The subjects in the report cards for all students in a class are same. Apart from academic subjects it covers extra curricular activities and also behavior. Time to time, scores or marks or observations are made on each of the area for every student. Using the report cards students are able to see where they are performing well, where they should be improving, where they have made improvements, how the performance compares with others. It is simple. It is powerful.

So also is IYS Skills Profile – simple and powerful. Creating this one report card for this space has involved research, consultations, trials and errors to get here. At least four times we have had to reconstruct from scratch the backend data structure of skills taxonomy and the frontend.

Universal adoption of IYS Skills Profile for jobs and people alike will come when this is shared with others who deal with skills data and thus we have the Skills Taxonomy API and the Skills Profiler plugin. We are focused and committed skills research (it is a fascinating world) and dream to be the best and authoritative resource on skills (like Wikipedia) and Google Maps. The idea of API is borrowed from Google Maps and seeing Google Maps drive most location based businesses, enablement of their businesses, collection of metadata from different applications, passing on intelligence back to the application for the benefit of the users. Will IYS Skills Profiler API lead to the ultimate quest of ours – personalized recommendations on talent development and talent deployment for every individual, life long….only time will tell.

Skills Taxonomy, Skills Profile etc are new concepts. Their utility needs to be shown in applications for people to appreciate to see how they can be deployed. And thus we created SAAS applications – Employee Skills Analytics and Candidate Skills Analytics. In the last 5 / 6 years (pre-Covid) HR Tech saw many ventures getting funded, ventures that aimed to apply AI to solve the matching of people and jobs problems with better crunching of resumes (and other sources of candidate information) and job descriptions. Resumes and Job Descriptions themselves are a problem. We need to get rid of them. Imaging a world without resumes and job descriptions but only report cards for all people and jobs. Lot will happen. (Of course, occupations of resume writers will go too.)

Watch video on Employee Skills Analytics Application
Watch video on Candidate Skills Analytics Application

So why crowdfunding? Are we reliable? Will we deliver?

We have run out of cash. Some plans have gone awry. And some of fund raising channels will not work for us or will take long time.

On reliability, one can check our creations and judge for oneself. Also for numbers of past, and future and models one can visit this page – https://www.itsyourskills.com/investor/

On our capabilities to scale and deliver, yes in the coming times we will need to augment resources. It needs to expand its team size. But at intent level we are as energetic to achieving our vision today as much as we were in 2010 when our journey starts.

We have made over 150K (tactical revenue) without soliciting for customers, from the likes of P&G, Workday, Saba, SEEK, Gartner, Tata Communications, even as we were evolving our solutions. Thanks for them we remained motivated, after all it was a vindication of the value we were creating.

We are seeking funds (goal is to raise now 25 lacs INR = 34K USD) from interested persons, to translate our energy to acceleration in growth. In order to conserve transactional time, we are would like minimum investment from one person to be 1 lac INR = 1,360 USD

Best that I be contacted on whatsapp at +91 98407 14525 for more information.