MindX Technology School wins top place at A-star AI Bootcamp

MindX, an online/offline education platform that focuses on preparing students for tech careers, introduced an artificial intelligence application that helps bring its graduate students to the job market faster and more efficiently. 

A-star Bootcamp, launched in June 2021, was founded by Dr. Thang Luong - staff research scientist at Google Brain, Dr. Thuc Vu - Founder and CEO at OhmniLabs and Kambria, and Vu Van - Founder and CEO of Elsa Speak, in collaboration with a global network of Vietnamese entrepreneurs and artificial intelligence experts. The program is co-organized by New Turing Institute and VietAI. 

Each year, the program selects 5-7 startups for an intensive training bootcamp, helping them integrate AI into their existing business models in order to reach 10-100x transformation of their value proposition and have a long-term positive impact in the world.

The Top 5 in the inaugural year were MindX Technology School (education), Hoozing (real estate), Digipay (finance), Vuihoc (education), and Jingo (knowledge sharing platform). 

“We feel very fortunate to have outstanding Vietnamese people from Silicon Valley, while living and working on the other side of the hemisphere, accompanying us throughout the bootcamp. I believe that we all share a faith in the power of digital technologies and the desire to make meaningful changes to the lives and future generations of Vietnam,” said Nguyen Thanh Tung, Co-Founder and CEO of MindX Technology School.

MindX's winning solution on the A-star bootcamp's Demo Day was an artificial intelligence (AI) model that hopes to bring job-matching to a new level.  

Stemming from the need to find jobs for graduate students each year, the education startup decided to leverage AI to automate the process of screening, evaluating and recommending candidate profiles for employers.

“Imagine we have to match dozens of pieces of data: the name, the skills, the tech stacks, the years of experience and so on from both individuals and businesses. Multiply them by thousands. That's a huge amount of manual work, taking lots of time and money to process", Tung said. 

With an initial database of more than 1,000 resumes and 41 job descriptions, MindX's AI model standardized various data formats with an accuracy rate of nearly 90%, while significantly improving the speed of matching jobs and candidate profiles. These features mean that graduate students could find better jobs and enter the job market faster. 

The solution also enables MindX to provide businesses with highly-skilled and suitable tech talents. The AI model would collect and analyze data from graduate students such as their background, academic performance and teacher assessment, thus making better informed, holistic suggestions for employers. 

In essence, the company looks to address a tech talent shortage that is estimated to hit 1 million programmers in Vietnam and 47 million in Asia by 2030. 

MindX currently has a global partner network of more than 200 tech companies across Vietnam, Singapore, Japan and so on.

It is one of the few educational institutions in Southeast Asia that provides a long-term learning roadmap for students from aged 8 to working professionals, with a commitment to guarantee jobs upon graduation in Vietnam and overseas. 

With courses varying from full-stack web/app developers, UI/UX design to Data Analysts, its alumni have gone on to work for leading tech firms such as Google, Shopee, Padlet Singapore, Coc Coc and so on. 

Last year, it just secured $3 million in a Series A funding round led by the VC fund Wavemaker Partners. Thien Viet Securities Company (TVS) and Beacon Fund also participated in the round.