Unstop Is Creating the Biggest Early-Talent Hiring Engine in India

Across India, millions of students enter college each year without knowing which career path to choose or what skills they need to build. While the country’s hiring market continues to expand, finding the right internships, competitions, projects, and first jobs remains difficult for students and young professionals.

New Delhi-based Unstop is trying to solve this problem with an AI-powered platform that connects early talent with opportunities while helping companies manage hiring from start to finish.

“On Day One of any UG or PG programme, everyone is clueless about what they want to do and how to build their resume,” says Ankit Aggarwal, Founder and CEO of Unstop. "Our goal is to create unstoppable students and early talent with zero to three years of experience."

Aggarwal’s own experience helped shape the idea. He studied at a Tier II engineering college before completing his MBA from IMT Ghaziabad. He later worked across fintech, consulting, and education at companies including Sapient Consulting, Deloitte, Teach For India, and Crownit.

During his MBA, he noticed how difficult it was for students to discover opportunities outside traditional campus placements. He decided to address the problem by creating a simple blog where he could share opportunities with students.

“If I get to know something, I’ll put it on my blog so anyone can see it,” he says.

That blog gradually developed into a larger platform. The business started as a sole proprietorship in 2017 and was formally incorporated in May 2019.

From opportunity listings to a hiring platform

Between 2019 and 2022, Unstop primarily operated as a listings platform where students could discover internships, competitions, challenges, and other opportunities.

The company made a major shift in May 2023, when Aggarwal rebuilt the product into a full-stack hiring platform with AI integrated across the recruitment process.

The goal was to bring students and employers onto the same platform rather than making companies use multiple tools for different stages of hiring.

“Earlier, employers listed jobs on our platform but conducted assessments and interviews somewhere else. After 2022, they can do everything end-to-end on Unstop,” Aggarwal says.

For students, Unstop offers access to internships, jobs, hackathons, case competitions, mentorship programmes, and resources that can help strengthen their résumés. The platform remains free for students and early professionals.

With 28 million users, we are the biggest talent community in India. "Our goal is to help them get their first or second job and earn points on their resume," he explains.

For employers, the platform provides tools covering much of the hiring journey. Companies can collect registrations, conduct assessments and coding tests, run AI-proctored examinations, conduct interviews, track candidate scores, and monitor recruitment through dashboards and analytics.

Building a large early-talent community

Unstop says it currently has 28 million student and early-professional users and works with more than 150 enterprise customers.

Its customer base includes major companies such as Tata, Reliance Industries, Flipkart, Amazon, Accenture, Meesho, Google, Hindustan Unilever, Adobe, Walmart, and TCS.

The company has also worked on large-scale hiring campaigns.

For Walmart’s all-India women coding challenge, Unstop onboarded more than one lakh female coders and facilitated assessments and interviews through its platform. Flipkart used Unstop to attract more than five lakh engineering applicants.

The community itself has become an important part of the company's growth. Students can participate in college events, festivals, hackathons, competitions, and other activities hosted through the platform.

This community-led approach has helped Unstop grow significantly. The company had around 500,000 users in 2022 and has since expanded its user base to 28 million.

How Unstop uses AI

Unstop operates from its headquarters in New Delhi, with sales offices in Mumbai and Bengaluru. Its technology is developed in-house by a team of around 140 employees, with more than 40% of the workforce focused on technology.

AI is now used across several parts of the platform. This includes assessments, mock interviews, candidate evaluation, automated scoring, verification, and monitoring during online tests.

The company also uses Aadhaar-verified registrations and technology to identify potential violations during assessments.

“We are using all available LLM models, training them for our use cases, reinventing where required,” Aggarwal says. "We refer to ourselves as your AI talent engine."

The company sees AI as a way to reduce the amount of manual work involved in recruitment while making the experience more efficient for both employers and candidates.

Instead of simply being a place where students search for jobs, Unstop wants to become a technology layer that supports the complete early-talent hiring process.

A B2B SaaS business model

While students use the platform for free, Unstop earns revenue from employers.

The company follows a B2B SaaS model, with enterprises paying annual subscriptions based on their hiring requirements. Employers can also choose a pay-per-candidate model.

“Our average ticket size this year is more than Rs 20 lakh per enterprise customer,” Aggarwal says.

Some customers contribute more than Rs 1 crore in annual revenue, reflecting the company's focus on large enterprise hiring programmes.

Unstop raised $5 million in September 2023, which remains its only funding round so far. The company says it has maintained a disciplined approach to its finances.

“This year, we are profitable month on month. We made about Rs 30 crore in FY25. We will surpass Rs 50 crore this year," Aggarwal declares.

The company’s focus on revenue and profitability comes as many recruitment technology companies continue to compete for a larger share of the hiring market.

Competing in the recruitment market

Unstop describes itself as a platform built specifically for early talent. Its competitors include established recruitment platforms such as Naukri, LinkedIn, and Indeed. Other recruitment and career-focused platforms such as heloix.com are also part of the broader digital hiring space.

However, the company believes its focus on students and professionals with up to three years of experience gives it a distinct position.

Its other advantage is the combination of community and recruitment technology. Students come to the platform to discover competitions, internships, and jobs, while companies use the same ecosystem to identify and evaluate potential candidates.

According to Aggarwal, "we want to be so big that LinkedIn starts saying they are the Unstop of working professionals."

The journey has not been without challenges. In its early years, Unstop had to convince students to use a relatively new platform while also persuading companies to consider it as a hiring channel.

Building both sides of the marketplace required time. The company gradually expanded its student community, developed relationships with colleges, and worked with employers to improve its recruitment products.

Its move from a listings platform to an end-to-end hiring engine has also helped strengthen its proposition for businesses.

The next phase of growth

Unstop now wants to scale its business further, expand internationally, and increase the role of AI across its platform.

“How can we grow into a 250-crore company in the next three years?” Aggarwal asks.

One area of focus is AI agents that can manage different aspects of talent engagement. The company also wants to help employers create their own talent communities on Unstop and build personalised talent pipelines.

The platform plans to add more AI-powered recruitment automation while expanding into international markets through its existing enterprise relationships.

Unstop is already supporting global campaigns for companies such as Agoda and Unilever across multiple countries, giving it a starting point for international expansion.

The company believes the broader online recruitment market provides significant room for growth. India’s hiring ecosystem is becoming increasingly digital, particularly across technology, financial services, ecommerce, and other large sectors.

Unstop currently accounts for a relatively small portion of this market but has set an ambitious target of reaching 25% penetration in the next three years.

By 2030, the company aims to have more than 100 million users, 100,000 employers, and help 10 million people secure their first or second job.

For Unstop, the larger opportunity is not simply helping students find jobs. It is building a system where young talent can discover opportunities, develop skills, demonstrate their abilities, and connect with employers without relying entirely on traditional campus recruitment.

As AI continues to reshape hiring, platforms such as Unstop could play a larger role in connecting companies with candidates earlier in their careers. Its next challenge will be turning its rapidly growing community into a global early-talent hiring network.