Career advice portal TapChief raises funding from Paytm, TaxiForSure's founder, others

Bengaluru-based TapChief, owned by Pilani Experts Technology Labs Pvt. Ltd, has secured an undisclosed amount of funding from Paytm, TaxiForSure's Aprameya Radhakrishna, Fisdom's Subramanya Venkat and Nu Ventures' Venk Krishnan, it said in a statement.

The funds will be used to develop a 'coach model' which is a structured programme that connects users with experts. "This includes a mentoring structure between the help seeker and the expert. We have already rolled out one coach programme called TapChief Job Coach where students can understand how to get placed. We will also roll out coach models around higher studies and specific skill sets such as marketing and analytics," said Shashank Murali, co-founder and CEO of TapChief.

The startup offers advice to students, professionals and startups through a pool of 5,000 listed experts. These experts include CEOs, entrepreneurs, consultants and senior executives from over 2,000 organisations. These consultations happen over a phone call, and not over an app, Murali explained.

Students can also opt for a job coach programme where they get trained for job interviews and placements by professionals from a company of their choice.

Every expert can set their own consultation charges and TapChief charges a fixed commission on every paid consultation on the platform.

TapChief was founded in February 2016 by BITS Pilani alumni Murali, Binay Krishna and Arjun Krishna.

"Over 40% of our experts do this on a pro-bono basis (without charging a fee) while the experts who do charge for their time usually donate their earnings to charitable organisations and NGOs through our platform. Having seen over 50,000 minutes worth of interactions on TapChief, the backing of a strong consumer-centric brand like Paytm will help us gear up for the next phase of growth," Murali said.

Earlier this year, TapChief secured $150,000 from Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma.

Prior to founding TapChief, Murali co-founded Edvice, a tutoring startup. Edvice was sold to US-based ed-tech company HashLearn in June 2015.