Head Held High Services raises Rs 2.5 crore from Unilazer Ventures and 5 angels from the Intellecap Impact Investment Network

Ronnie Screwvala’s investment firm Unilazer has invested Rs 2.5 crore in Bangalore-based Head Held High Services (HHH), alongwith other investors, that included five angels from the Intellecap Impact Investment Network (I3N). The five angels are Pravin Gandhi, Jayesh Parekh, Reena Mithal, Sanjeev Shah and Kartik Kilachand.

HHH, which was founded in 2012 by Madan Padaki (former co-founder of MeritTrac) and Rajesh Bhat, will use the investment to refine their rural entrepreneurship business model, ink critical partnerships and build processes and technology solutions. HHH’S goal is to spread to 100 districts by 2018, and impact the lives of 2 million rural youth, over the next 10 years.

“We are privileged to have such socially conscientious investors on our journey. With their support and network, we will now be able to ramp-up on talent, technology and partnerships that are key to achieve scale. Their participation has strengthened our ability to create massive social impact in a sustainable manner,” said Madan Padaki, co-founder and executive chairman, HHH in a statement.

HHH has a three-pronged vision of talent transformation, employment creation and entrepreneur engagement, for the services economy. It advocates the concept of ‘Rubans’: who are defined as the new rural youth possessing raw talent, an entrepreneurial spirit and technologically savvy. “We are working hard to empower ‘Rubans’ with skills and knowledge and link them to opportunities previously unavailable to them,” added Rajesh Bhat, co-founder and CEO, HHH.

HHH is involved in three programs at present. RubanShakti is a training initiative for rural youth, where they undergo a five-month residential program that reaches them English and computer skills. HHH has has trained over 800 youth in three districts – Koppal, Gadag (Karnataka) and Anantpur (AP), generating jobs for 90 per cent of its trainees.

RubanSource: a platform that enables ‘Rubans’ to deliver services like BPO, market surveys and other info-services from non-urban locations. Lastly, the Ruban Entrepreneur Forum (REF) builds capacity in rural entrepreneurs and enables them to provide last-mile capability across sectors. HHH has launched the REF Gadag Chapter and is working with 50+ rural entrepreneurs in exploring new business opportunities.

Picture courtesy: http://www.head-held-high.org