Aspiring Minds acquires internship platform LetsIntern

Gurgaon-based skills assessment company Aspiring Minds has acquired LetsIntern.com,  a web and mobile platform to discover internships.

"LetsIntern.com gives us a very reliable presence in the internship space and in continuing our efforts to add more value to students, colleges and corporations. We expect to combine the reach of both AMCAT and Letsintern.com platforms and achieve significant synergies," said Himanshu Aggarwal, CEO of Aspiring Minds, on the investment.

AMCAT is a computer adaptive test which measures job applicants on critical areas like communication skills, logical reasoning, quantitative skills and job specific domain skills thus helping recruiters identify the suitability of a candidate.

The LetsIntern platform, run by Letsintern Career Solutions Pvt Ltd, claims to have a network of 4 million students and more than 22,000 organisations.

"We believe internship is an integral part of the talent identification and improvement process. It is thus natural for us to provide this service to students, mediated by assessments, to make the labour market overall more efficient," said Varun Aggarwal, CTO, Aspiring Minds.

LetsIntern was founded by Rishabh Gupta, Mayank Batheja and Pranay Swarup in 2010.

In October this year, Aspiring Minds floated a $1 million (around Rs 6.5 crore) fund to provide seed capital to startups in the educational technology and employment space. The fund aims to assist innovative ideas and fledgling companies by providing market access, execution advice and capital. It also plans to incubate these firms for a fixed duration, if required.

In August, Aspiring Minds acquired Mizcoin, a Noida-based mobile software development company, for an undisclosed amount.

Aspiring Minds Assessment Pvt Ltd was founded in 2009 by Varun and Himanshu Aggarwal, and offers employability assessments, talent benchmarking and analytics besides connecting talent to information technology, small and medium enterprises, hospitality, life sciences, banking, financial services and insurance, knowledge process outsourcing and information technology enabled services.

Aspiring Minds' investors are Ajit Khimji Group and Omidyar Network. In May this year, the company said it would invest $6 million over the next three years in research and technology innovation in skills assessment.