Founders
Akash Senapaty
Eashwar Subbiah
Shailesh Daxini
Vah Vah! is a live, online vocational training platform that offers professional beauty courses. The startup’s mission is to educate and prepare India’s young and dynamic population for their careers, training them in vocational skills so that they can find employment or run their own business.
College is not an option for about 20 million secondary school graduates each year, either due to their financial circumstances or school grades. Even current vocational training options are inaccessible or too costly for many – making it especially challenging for those who live outside of metropolitan areas looking to upskill themselves. What’s more, there’s a shortfall of vocational schools.
It’s projected that by 2023, India will need over 70 million people in the skilled labour workforce, yet only has a training capacity for about 13 million students. The beauty segment alone would need three million new workers in the next three years, while the current infrastructure only has the capacity to train about half a million people. This leaves a huge gap between employment supply and demand for many industries.
Vah Vah! aims to solve this problem by making quality vocational education accessible to anyone with a mobile phone and an Internet connection, at an affordable price. The platform currently offers students courses in hair and makeup, taught by experienced beauty industry professionals. For example, their professional makeup artist course is a 22-day comprehensive training program across a variety of looks, such as fashion and bridal makeup, and includes career counselling and one-on-one Q&A time with trainers. This gives students a good grasp on makeup knowledge and boosts their confidence to find relevant employment.
Vah Vah!’s courses are offered in small batches, and students are sent learning kits with all the material they will need to complete the course and get certified. The platform, which has trained scores of students across India, has a consistently high NPS score of over 70 for every graduating batch. Vah Vah! plans to add more courses across a variety of industries to its platform in the coming months.
The company was founded in Bangalore in October 2020.