Gurugram | 10th November 2020: Junoon, founded by 17 year old entrepreneur Ahaan Aggarwal is a vocational training and Jobs search platform for blue collared workers in India has raised seed round from reputed investors like Kunal Khattar, Sandeep Aggarwal, Chaim Freidman, Viren Rana and Vishesh Tandon. The deal size and company valuation are undisclosed and the round is led by Kunal Khattar of AdvantEdge and Tech Entrepreneur and Investor Viren Rana.
Junoon launched in April 2020 with a mission to help blue collar workers unleash their full potential by providing standard and easy to assimilate vocational training and land satisfying jobs. Ahaan Aggarwal developed the platform while pursuing his IB and High School Diploma from the American Embassy School, New Delhi.
During the pandemic, over 360 million informal jobs were impacted in India, resulting in an unemployment rate of over 23.5%. Junoon also released a research report on the informal jobs sector, that further talks about the eradication of livelihoods, and lack of training and opportunities to upskill for the 500 million labour force in India. Over 93% of the workers in this segment, had never received any vocational training.
To solve this problem, Ahaan Aggarwal conceptualized and developed Junoon which not only provides rich training and upskilling programs to workers in over 20 categories but also supports them in finding a sustainable livelihood as per their improved proficiency. The training programs come in both text and video format and, also incorporates an AI based algorithm to match the employer with the right set of skilled candidates.
Speaking on the investment and the opportunity Ahaan Aggarwal, Founder & CEO, Junoon affirmed “India is the home for largest number of blue collared workers in the world. During the lockdown, most of us normalized work-from home very quickly, I could see that its wasn’t the same for the large majority of unskilled workers across the country. The mass exodus from the urban areas due to extinguished opportunities was horrifying on multiple aspects.
I created Junoon to support our workers to come back to the job market by being better trained and give them the ability to easily find opportunities. In many ways, we are creating digital community colleges for vocational training and placements. We are supported in this endeavor by corporates, individuals and government branches – and would like to invite more to work with us on this life and economy changing initiative.”
Speaking on the investment Kunal Khattar, Managing Partner, AdvantEdge Founders said, “We have been observing the way this young venture has been leading from the front and believe that it has the requisite vision and execution in place to upskill our blue collared workers in country. These people witnessed hand to mouth situation due to no job in the Pandemic and now facing lots of challenge to get back the required Job. Right set of trainings will scale the working procedure of these workers. I collaborated considering how the vision is to provide the right set of talent to enterprises too.”
