BetterPlace, an Indian blue-collar lifecycle management platform, announced on Monday that it had acquired Oust Labs, a US-based micro-learning software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup in an all-cash deal. The financials, however, were not disclosed.
This development comes only weeks after Betterplace secured $24 million in a Series C fundraising round backed by Jungle Ventures and 3one4 Capital. The objective of this acquisition is to offer digital skilling and training services for blue-collar professionals.
Pravin Agarwala, Co-Founder, and CEO of BetterPlace commented on the development, saying, “We are thrilled to welcome Oust as part of the BetterPlace family and help organizations and employees achieve efficiency and excellence. We will make it available to 1,000+ of our enterprise customers and their massive distributed workforce.”
The Bengaluru-based technology platform for blue and grey collar workforce management, Betterplace was founded by Pravin Agarwala and Uday Singh in 2015 as a background verification startup before shifting to become an employee lifecycle management platform. Hiring, Assessment, Attendance Management, Payroll, Compliance, among other services are currently offered. The startup claims to have worked with more than 1,000 organizations with 8.1 million personnel.
BetterPlace customers are employed in a variety of blue-collar heavy industries, including private security, logistics, facilities management, IT/ITES, on-demand services, retail, and construction. BetterPlace claims that this acquisition will improve its end-to-end workforce management solutions for enterprise businesses.
According to market analysis, only 3 percent of the blue-collar workforce is formally educated, with the rest learning on the job. Millions of people need to be trained and upskilled in order to achieve their goals, forge a career path, and eventually enjoy higher earnings.
Oust Labs, on the other hand, is a tech startup headquartered in California that has introduced gamified microlearning courses for its clients’ personnel. Oust Labs’ multilingual writing solution guides organizations to create unique content across 35+ languages. The Oust platform has been leveraged to skill almost 1 million users spanning India and South East Asia by 2021, and it hopes to upskill 20 million users within the next 24 months.
Shrikant Latkar the Founder and CEO of Oust Labs quoted, “Seekhega India, Toh Badhega India.” With a vision of facilitating every worker in thriving in the new economy. This certainly demonstrates that Betterplace’s comprehensive suite of employee lifecycle management technologies will thrive from this acquisition.
Although most major organizations have accepted structured performance management and upskilling systems for white-collar professionals, the same cannot be said for blue-collar workers.
