Coding bootcamps and lorry drivers schools in the US: how can Vedai help them
Vedai is a product built by the Collective Intelligence Labs accelerator.
Vedai is an income share agreement platform that helps educational institutions enrol more students. Currently, we’re targeting two particular types of institutions — coding bootcamps and lorry-driver schools.
While the need for ISAs in education is evident, to build an MVP we need to focus on a certain market segment, and we chose these two as they show great market opportunity and potential demand for ISA* tools.
* Income Share Agreements (ISA) are a contract through which a student receives funding for study in exchange for a fixed percentage of their future income. An ISA provider pays for the course that the student takes, and in return the student contractually agrees to pay the provider a percentage of their salary for a set period of time in the future.
Learn more about ISAs:
- TechCrunch: How income share agreements will spark the rise of career accelerators
- Yahoo Finance: Income share agreements: Assessing the latest big idea for fixing the U.S. student loan crisis
- Forbes: Are income-share agreements a good idea?
- MarketWatch: What is an income share agreement? What college students need to know about this type of student loan
Lorry driver schools opportunity
The US is now facing a shortage of 80 000 truck drivers, which in the next 10 years will double if nothing changes. Truck driving is a historically and economically important profession for the US, and all the market players are interested in solving this problem. There are currently a lot of schools that train people to become lorry drivers. Almost all of them offer some financial opportunities for their students, like loans etc. Vedai could become one of them, helping to start education for people who can’t afford it at the moment.
Coding bootcamps opportunity
Coding bootcamps offer an opportunity to become an IT professional within 3–6 months instead of years at University. The market size of coding bootcamps was valued at $399.91 million in 2018 and is projected to reach $889 million by 2026.
What value can Vedai bring both to lorry driver schools and coding bootcamps?
Schools and bootcamps can finance their ISA programs before students graduate and start repaying. Both lorry driver schools and coding bootcamps will be able to enrol more students if they don’t need to cover the cost of their studies from their own budget before they begin generating income from previous ISA cohorts.
While doing customer development we realized that Vedai would bring the biggest value if it offers two big options:
Launch and administer ISA programs
From student onboarding to all legal disclosures, all in one place.
- Design your own ISA program
Personalize your ISA: define the cost of the program and set the key terms (minimum income threshold, max payment cap, payment window, the number of payments).
- Manage student enrollment
Track application status, make enrollment decisions, sign ISA contracts.
- Collect repayments
After graduation, students submit their payments via their personal accounts in Vedai, you can see the status of all repayments real-time.
- Track student job success
Students certify their income periodically, you can use this data.
Raise investments to fund ISA programs
Launch crowdinvesting campaigns in a few clicks and attract investment from anyone.
- Easy setup of a crowdinvesting campaign
Turn your ISAs into shares and sell a part of them to raise investments.
- Investor management tools
Track all investments and investors, with customizable reporting and analytics.
- Automated payouts to investors
Your investors get paid their returns monthly, once your students start graduating.
Coding bootcamps and lorry driver schools are just two use cases we start with. We believe Vedai can bring value to many other spheres that offer educational opportunities.
