Canduit

Canduit is solving the disconnect between classroom learning and skill  expectations in the job market. We are trying to reduce youth unemployment and student retention in higher education.

Canduit is a SaaS platform for experiential learning, matching students looking to gain real-world experience with companies hosting exciting projects. Currently working with 30+ universities in North and Latin America, as well as online education programs, high schools, and bootcamps, we offer an online project marketplace, virtual project environment, and predictive analytics that help students create personalized project roadmaps and career paths.

We are already working in Peru, Chile, Guatemala, and Jamaica, helping professors implement virtual project-based learning programs to complement classroom instruction. This helps students to broaden their network and employer connections, explore industries and fields of interest, and prepare for future careers.

There is a disconnect between companies looking for early-career talent and students developing new skills and finding jobs after graduating. Companies use interviews and resume screens for campus recruiting, which are weakly correlated with on-the-job performance and lead to biases. Students study from textbooks, lacking real-world connections and exposure to different industries and career fields. 

This is a major problem as over 40% of recent college grads are underemployed in jobs unrelated to their degrees and companies are spending $10 billion annually USD on campus recruiting. Traditional brick-and-mortar education is losing relevance. 70% of job knowledge is acquired through experience and only 5% of textbook learning is retained. 

These challenges of unemployment and underemployment particularly apply to students in rural and remote areas, who do not have the same access to opportunities because there are fewer companies in those regions offering jobs and paid employment.

Canduit is a versatile solution that can appeal to emerging markets and make a real social impact in equalizing opportunity for people from rural or remote communities, people with disabilities, etc. In particular, there is a large Chilean (1.3 million students) and Latin American market (17 million students). We want to reach students from traditionally disadvantaged backgrounds.

Through market research with 15 universities and interviews with around 50 students throughout Chile as part of a Start-Up Chile grant, we found that the problem of unemployment is exacerbated in Chile, where the concept of on-campus recruiting does not exist, students need one year of work experience for most jobs, and there is huge inequality in access to opportunities, depending on university name, family connections, and socioeconomic status.

Through online tools, we can increase the equity and accessibility of our ed-tech solution. The global e-learning market is estimated to reach $325 billion by 2025. Now is the right time for Canduit, as companies are increasingly turning to remote work (2/3 of all employees in the US work from home at least once per week) and SaaS collaboration and communication tools, like Trello, Slack, and Zoom, are growing in popularity.

Canduit is a web platform for project-based learning where graduate and undergraduate students (“mentees”) and alumni work on enterprise-sponsored projects to gain experience while enterprises leverage student project contributions as a means to gain insights into what university programs are producing students best suited for the future of the organization and their talent strategy. Students can get involved as individuals, as part of an instructor-led classroom, or as part of an extracurricular student organization. Students will be able to use our online tools to connect with employers, pursue online courses to fill in resume gaps, customize a skills and experiences roadmap to track progress toward their career goals, and accumulate a "digital resume" of work samples. We are addressing the problems of students not being able to connect their coursework with real-world experiences and employers seeing applied skills shortages in applicants.

We believe Canduit will be impactful in Latin America, where 50% of formal businesses can’t find candidates with the needed skills. In speaking to 15-20 universities in Chile and Peru, 100% of them expressed a need for a product like Canduit.

In addition to our online project marketplace and virtual workspace (where students can work on projects collaboratively with companies through online project management, communication, and feedback tools), we incorporate artificial intelligence/predictive analytics to help match students to projects, help students track their skill development and map their careers, and help map those students to employers and jobs in our database based on 360-degree feedback, interests, skill attainment/mastery, and personalities.

Canduit has a three-tier technology platform: a project marketplace available to professors, mentors, and students; a virtual communication/collaboration platform for remote work; and predictive analytics that gamify new skill attainment and recommend project/job opportunities based on profile data and project performance. Our predictive analytics component helps students to create realistic skill pathways based on specific knowledge, skills, abilities, and psychometric data. The roadmap serves as a tool for keeping students on track towards their desired careers upon graduating. Our recommendation system uses that roadmap data to identify and match projects posted to the platform with individual student skills profiles. Universities are able to use our workforce readiness data, which is based on the number of projects successfully completed at a particular university and employer feedback, as a tool for tracking and measuring student outcomes, and companies can use the resources on our platform (e.g. student project samples, posted feedback, data analytics) to better evaluate, target, and recruit candidates for longer-term internships or full-time jobs. This proprietary AI-powered technology is newly available and will change how we can maximize our social impact.

Our theory of change is that project-based learning (PBL) will improve career outcomes for students, particularly by helping with the college-to-career transition for students from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds. We have looked at a lot of empirical research around the benefits of PBL in increasing student engagement with course material.

A study called "The Validity and Utility of Selection Methods in Personnel Psychology," a meta-analysis of 32,000 employees across 515 jobs found that General Mental Ability (GMA) and work sample tests have the highest validity rating. Behavioral interviews were not a good predictor of on-the-job performance.

Many of our companies specifically commit to hiring students based on project outcomes. By using standardized project-based work as part of the assessment model, we are able to increase the pipeline of diverse talent and more accurately qualify students in determining the best fit for job positions and companies on a competency and personality basis.

We are currently following the progress of students who have completed projects to understand how likely they are to continue working with their host organization in a full-time or entry-level position capacity. So far, around 25% of students continue engagement with companies post-project and our goal is to guarantee interviews to students who meet certain performance benchmarks.

We currently reach 2,000 students who are directly involved in project-based learning initiatives. We see this as being a big year for us and would like to grow to reach 20,000 students by end of year and then 500,000 students within five years.

Our partnership with PMI ensures that we will reach a member base of 550,000 within the coming months. 

Within the next year, we want to have grown to 20,000 student users and $15,000 in Monthly Recurring Revenue, and expanded to at least two other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. We also want to establish a permanent Latin America office and incorporate Canduit in Chile. We have already hired our first engineering team members in Santiago. We have strategic partnerships with First Job (www.firstjob.me), a career network in Latin America that boasts 150 companies and 250,000 students in its network, and The Intern Group, which works with 3,000 companies globally for physical internships and is supporting our sales global efforts. 

We will scale by allowing employers to replicate the same project across multiple campuses and matching US-based companies with LATAM university students, particularly those students in engineering and data science fields who are interested in remote work. This will lead to more supply-demand rebalancing in the talent market globally.

We are still refining our pricing strategy and business model. We need to figure out whether we should still sell to university departments or focus primarily on B2B enterprise sales and whether we should charge a fee to individual users. Additionally, on the company side, we have found clients have many different reasons for choosing Canduit and we want to hone in on our most compelling value proposition. The other uncertainties are around technology adoption and whether we can quickly build a scalable and user-friendly SaaS product that grows organically.

Each new market requires local knowledge and expertise and comes with legal, cultural, and regulatory barriers. 

Right now, we believe the most lucrative market is in the recruitment industry and presenting Canduit as a way for companies to build their brand and pipeline/qualify diverse students.

We are looking into ways for strategic partners to co-sell Canduit to companies in their networks and co-market Canduit to students. Additionally, we will use social media and digital advertising channels and "campus ambassadors" to reach more students quickly. Our strategy to save money and expedite growth is to hire a bilingual sales team based in Chile and to also hire country or regional managers to bring Canduit to their local company and university ecosystems, so we start to see the "network effect" and our marketplace can operate autonomously. We will scale first geographically in areas where we have strategic partnerships.

We have completed projects in Chile with Universidad de Chile and Universidad de Santiago and top companies like BCI, Uber, and Ripley. After participating in both Start-Up Chile and UTEC Ventures, we have contracts with 10 universities in Chile signed up and also 5 universities in Peru, where they have agreed to integrate Canduit into specific degree programs. We have partnerships with a few coding schools in Latin America too, including Laboratoria, and are often helping to place students for virtual internships or capstone projects with US companies looking to work with students in LATAM. This opens up new models of remote working and opportunities for intercultural exchange.

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-2 co-founders and 1 Chief Academic Officer (full-time)

-1 full-time sales manager

-2 full-time developers

Our team has worked together for several years (Eve joined more recently through Start-Up Chile), and we bring diverse industry/academic perspectives and complementary strengths. Greg Lewin (CEO) is the industry expert in recruitment, having started his own recruitment company doing over $1M in annually sales, and brings a network of corporate and investor connections. A business graduate from Wharton who has worked for the UN and Uber, Leah's strengths lie in business and addressing social needs, and as a recent graduate, she relates with the students' perspective. Eve is a sales and marketing expert who specializes in Latin America (having worked in Colombia and Chile after graduating from University of Miami) and can lead Canduit's deployment in Chile/LATAM. In addition to Greg, Leah, and Alvaro, we have Justin Low, our Chief Academic Officer, PhD, who contributes his higher education expertise as a professor and university administrator and manages our university relations, and Sergio Mirando, a full-stack big data engineer in Chile, who has background as a programming instructor and working for companies like Cencosud and Banco Ripley. Justin and Sergio understand how Canduit can positively impact educators and the university experience.

We are currently partnered with 30+ universities, including around 15 in Chile and Peru. We are also working with the Project Management Institute (PMI), a global non-profit dedicated to project management with 550,000+ members. They are helping to integrate our offerings into their products and connecting us to corporations in their network. 

We are speaking to several Learning Management Systems, like Canvas, Blackboard, CursosWeb, and Moodle about integrations. In addition, we partner with job boards, like FirstJob and GetonBrd, to provide skill and project-based assessments to help quality talent for job and internship openings.

Canduit has participated in a variety of accelerators, including Start-Up Chile, UTEC Ventures, CivicX Future of Work Accelerator with Acumen, and TechDiversity Accelerator with Tampa Bay Wave and the Nielsen Foundation. We also consider these organizations to be partners, as they help us navigate the university and company ecosystems in different geographic markets, make intros for us, and allow us to market our services at various pitch days and networking events.

Subscription: Universities pay a per-student subscription fee for use of the technology platform, which includes professor and student access to our project marketplace and project management tools. This fee ranges from $50-$200 USD per year per student. Course Integrations: A course integration fee is paid by the company to have their project integrated into coursework at one or more partner schools. This is paid as a revenue share between university and Canduit (part as a tax-deductible donation to university, can be distributed to students as scholarships). This fee ranges from $1500-$10,000+ USD per project. We will use revenue to subsidize free pilots at universities in disadvantaged communities and developing countries that cannot pay for the technology.

Through our most recent investment, we will have enough capital to get through our next milestones. The goal is to grow through partnerships and now sign larger contracts that guarantee annual recurring revenue. We will also apply for government grants to provide access to our technology to all universities, regardless of funding level and ability to pay.

The funding will help us reach our growth milestones and bring on new team members to build new features in our technology. We would like to add a social networking aspect, so students can build teams from across universities and companies, and a scalable solution for companies to replicate the same branded project across multiple online courses to expand their reach.

The publicity and networking through the TPrize Challenge would also introduce us to potential university and company partners who could participate in projects or help us better reach professors and students interested in curriculum reform. It could also help us identify candidates for some of our open job positions, like a CTO and Sales Lead.

Universities that could help as distribution partners:

-MIT

-Harvard

-The UC system

-NYU

-McGill

-Universidad de Chile

-Pontifical Catholic University of Peru

-Universidad de los Andes

Ed-tech organizations:

-CampusLabs

-Riipen

-Handshake

-Pearson

Recruiting/job boards:

-WayUp

-FirstJob

-GetonBrd

-Indeed

Large corporations that could sponsor projects:

-Facebook

-Google

-Microsoft

-PepsiCo

-Johnson & Johnson

-Mastercard

-McKinsey

-Any Fortune 500 organization