One-line solution summary:
Symba, an all-female founded tech startup, is the leading remote internship platform on a mission to open up the workforce.
Pitch your solution.
In 2017, Ahva Sadeghi was a fellow with Congressman John Lewis and co-founded Symba to address unequal access to the workforce by leveraging the power of remote internships.
Today, the pandemic has shed light on the importance of remote work and diversity and inclusion. However, organizations and job-seekers are struggling. Our nation is in the middle of an unemployment crisis. Companies need powerful tools designed to scale remote operations, and people need a new way to access job opportunities.
Symba fills this gap at the entry point of the workforce - internships. For employers, they can easily streamline remote internship with onboarding, engagement, and management all-in-one place. We’ve helped teams scale up to 600% to offer more paid opportunities to students from all zipcodes. We help students land their dream opportunity and prepare for the future of work.
Symba is opening up the workforce and remaining pathways to employment!
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
The problem we are addressing is accessibility to the workforce for the millions people around the world. For job-seekers, it means equitable opportunities to enter and participate in the workforce. For companies, that means being able to scale operations remotely to tap into diverse talent pools.
Access to today's workforce is limited and often very exclusive. There are over 200 million students in higher education around the globe, but key internship opportunities are only based in major metropolitan hubs. Additionally, the majority of those internships are unpaid, which already excludes many students who cannot afford to work without a pay.
To uncover the real problem, our team at Symba sat down with over 250 human resources leaders to ask them if they could scale their programs to reach more communities across the US rather than recruiting from major metropolitan hubs. They told us that it was difficult to scale remotely (some even said impossible)!
By making the entry point to the workforce more accessible through remote opportunities, Symba has the potential to make a long-term impact in the efforts of diversity and inclusion in the global workforce.
What is your solution?
Our solution bridges the gap between accessibility by help employers and students alike to ensure a successful pathway to employment. Symba helps companies source and scale remote internships through these two software solutions:
1. Symba’s MatchMaking Solution: Organizations can post paid remote internships on Symba and students create profiles to apply to these remote internships. Symba’s platform incorporates proprietary algorithms to enable the best matching of students to domestic and international organizations.
2. Symba’s Management Solution: comprehensive internship platform helps organizations manage the logistics of hosting a remote intern including onboarding, project assignment, communication tools and feedback mechanisms. This is our special sauce! Our proprietary software saves organizations the time, cost, and hassles that come along with having internship programs.
We also have a free offering that we crowdsource for students called the Symba Slate that aggregates the world’s leading and only job board exclusively for paid remote internship opportunities.
Which dimension of the Challenge does your solution most closely address?
Match current and future employer and industry needs with education providers, workforce development programs, and diverse job seekersWho does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Although employers are our customers, Symba’s primary beneficiary is the youth workforce and job-seeker market. Symba’s solution enables organizations to scale their operations to provide more professional development opportunities for students and recruit from a greater talent pool. One of our customers, Robinhood, shared that Symba has enabled them to recruit young talent from different locations around the country. In doing so, we serve the youth network with greater opportunities to prepare for the future of work.
Designed by a team of former interns who resonate with the challenges of access to the workforce and employment, we focus our efforts on how Symba will empower job-seekers. In doing so, we developed Symba with the intern user in mind. Before we wrote a single line of code, we sat down with thousands of interns to understand their needs and pitfalls in order to develop a solution that would directly solve their pain points.
In addition, we partner with leading organizations like INROADS and Students Rising above that are committed to empowering underserved youth with career opportunities. We host a variety of pro-bono workshops and seminars entirely for students.
Explain how the problem, your solution, and your solution’s target population relate to the Reimagining Pathways to Employment in the US Challenge and your selected dimension.
Symba is perfectly aligned with Reimagining Pathways to Employment in the US because Symba removes the barriers of entry to the workforce and powers a new pathway to the workforce using remote internships. Symba’s innovation helps companies create scalable and accessible internship programs for students everywhere. On Symba, companies are redesigning and scaling their programs, therefore opening up more doors to opportunities for talent from untapped geographies like never before.
All people deserve access to equal opportunity and employment. This is only possible when the current workforce system is reimagined. It begins with upskilling and providing equal access to internship opportunities.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
San Francisco, CA, USAIn which US state(s) will you be operating within the next year?
What is your solution’s stage of development?
Growth: An organization with an established product, service, or business model rolled out in one or, ideally, several communities, which is poised for further growthWho is the team lead for your solution?
Ahva Sadeghi, Co-Founder & CEO
How many people work on your solution team?
On the Symba team, we have:
- 8 full-time team members
- 3 part-time team members
- 4 paid remote interns!
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: What is your approach to building a diverse, equitable, and inclusive organization?
Creating a diverse, equitable and inclusive organization is core to our identity at Symba and drives our internal and external operations daily. Symba is founded by a diverse team of female entrepreneurs and core to our mission at Symba is to drive meaningful change that enables our clients to foster diversity and inclusion in their own practices.
Our team has participated in multiple initiatives and social impact incubators to learn these best practices and instill them within our work at Symba. In order to uphold our core values and commitment to diversity and inclusion, we only do business, take capital, and hire team members who align with our mission.
If you have additional video content that explains your solution, provide a YouTube or Vimeo link here:
Which of the following categories best describes your solution?
A new technologyDescribe what makes your solution innovative.
Symba is the leader behind the entire remote internship movement.
What makes Symba innovative is how we combine the power of managing and engaging early stage talent in one platform. These two functions are often siloed and not captured to coexist in current operations and workflows amongst teams. This is problematic because research clearly articulates that productivity can be bolstered by employee engagement and motivation. By marrying these two functions on Symba’s platform, we have designed a whole new approach to scaling remote operations successfully.
This is captured in Symba’s platform features such as the Community Board, Discussion Threads, and Engage Video Galleries. These key features include building a community amongst the cohort, tracking performance and metrics around the success of the program, and more. The Symba team not only hands the product to our customers, but as recent interns ourselves, we know what it takes to create a meaningful experience.
When it comes to internship matchmaking, our competitors include Way Up, Handshake, and internships.com. Our competitors in the management space include Asana, Trello, Sharepoint, and Zoho. We have yet to find a competitor who has combined both management and matchmaking.
Describe the core technology, if applicable, that powers your solution.
Symba is a multi-tenant web based application developed on the cloud. Symba’s technology stack includes Python, Django, and React.js, and is hosted on AWS. Symba’s platform is built with three different types of interfaces.
Symba is a software application designed to interface with program coordinators, HR leaders, managers, and interns. Symba’s engineering team has designed a platform to offer private instances for each organization to host and streamline an entire internship program. Symba’s core technology is a secure web and mobile-friendly application that engages all users to adopt virtual operations. With a SaaS application, we are easily able to scale programs and set up organizations with accounts within minutes! Through hosting it on the cloud and setting up virtual infrastructure, our team deploys new features on a daily basis and follows top security practices. On AWS, Symba incorporates EC2, Elastic Beanstalk, Secure SSL, Lambda, Simple Storage Service (S3), and Virtual Private Cloud. With Symba, we have been able to save internship programs and stand them up for success to offer more opportunities to students in a whole new way.
Symba’s software is proudly built by a Female Chief Technology Officer.
Provide evidence that this technology works.
Symba is a product-driven startup and our engineering team brings together the best talent to ensure our product quality. Since we work closely with enterprise clients, our product follows best security practices. Based on real customer interviews, we know our product is incredibly sticky and has high customer adoption and NPS. Our users engage and log into Symba at least 6-9 times a day and over 90% have completed their profiles. Just this past summer, over 20,000 projects were created on Symba and students participating in internship programs were more engaged and active throughout their program.
With Symba, our customers have been able to extend and scale their programs across all industries. Symba is a tool that is industry agnostic, and used by organizations coming from the technology sector, pharmaceutical industry, healthcare, fin-tech, retail and more. For examples, ome of our customers include Genentech, MGM Grand International Resorts, and CBS Interactive.
To view a demo of Symba, please click here. Symba is a web application hosted on AWS, and built on a technology stage including Python, Django, and React.js.
To view how Symba helped stand up a program of more than 250 participants, click here.
Please select the technologies currently used in your solution:
What is your theory of change?
Symba originally started off as a marketplace to connect students with virtual opportunities. As our team spoke with over 500+ HR leaders and thousands of students, we realized there was a bigger problem that needed to be solved. The Symba team then built a platform to help organizations manage their interns, both remotely and in-house. Our platform has evolved in design and feature additions, and has become an industry standard technology tool to manage early talent and streamline programs.
Immediate output:
Using Symba, our customers are able to open more doors for talent. One of our largest customers was able to scale their internship program by 600% (grew from 55 to over 300 remote interns in one year).
Longer-term outcome:
Being able to scale internship programs remotely allows organizations to provide professional development opportunities to more talent than ever before. Going beyond their geographical area and target universities, we enable employers to open up the workforce to individuals with less access to opportunities.
Immediate output:
Our platform centers on creating meaningful remote work experiences, our tools enable remote collaboration, engagement and collaboration
Longer-term outcome:
Remote work is no longer a trend, but a necessary reality that will permeate our working environment even after the COVID pandemic is over. By being first movers in this space, addressing our customers’ pain point, and ensuring retention of our tool, we will be able to set standards for creating meaningful remote, hybrid and in-person programs for years to come.
We have created the first ever job board that aggregates only paid remote internships. We have also built a community around 3,000 talented individuals from around the world who have exclusive access to our remote internship resources.
Longer-term outcome:
Through our talent community and curated job board we democratizing access to opportunity. We are changing the narrative of who can be an intern, as our community is composed of high school students, moms returning to the workforce, people transitioning their careers, veterans, persons with disabilities and more!
Select the key characteristics of your target population.
How many people does your solution currently serve? How many people did your solution serve in 2019? 2018? 2017?
2020 (10,057 people) 2019 (1,326 people) 2018 (0) 2017 (0)
What percent of the people you served in 2019 were between the age of 15 and 30?
What barriers currently exist for you to accomplish your goals in the next year and in the next five years?
Some of the challenges we face include:
Access to Capital: As women of color founders, we already experienced firsthand the challenge of raising institutional capital during our pre-seed round. We hope that more investors will offer funding opportunities to diverse founders to help scale Symba’s impact.
Technical: Some of the key product challenges we are facing is creating a self-service model for organizations to easily get started on Symba and integrating with current applicant tracking systems.
Potential Market Barriers: With many changes around workforce development, we will face challenges to educate organizations about different working models such as hybrid, fully remote, or onsite offices.
What are your goals within the next year and within the next five years?
In the next year, we plan to scale our impact to power over 25,000 internship experiences and launch our international expansion in Europe. We are already working with European companies to implement Symba’s software and tools to streamline internship experiences abroad.
In the next five years, we have a big vision to power over one million career development experiences. We plan to expand beyond just internships into all early workforce development programs and be the platform of choice that powers these career opportunities.
How do you plan to overcome these barriers?
Access to Capital: Our current investors have been our biggest champions. We plan to tap into their networks to reach additional investors for future fundraising opportunities. Also, by speaking up more about fundraising for female founders, we hope to inspire others and build a community to propel other founders like us forward.
Technical: By expanding our engineering team and leveraging new technologies, we will create a self service model to scale and acquire new customers faster and offer integrations to provide a seamless experience for all users.
Market: We are already seeing a shift in work trends and investment from companies into reskilling employees.
What outcomes data would you like to be collecting that you are not yet able to collect?
We started working on remote internships when everyone told us “remote internships would never happen.” Symba is the first mover to the market and the industry leader in the internship design. Our founding team has done over 30 internships combined and we are backed by leaders in HR and remote work. Symba is founded by a diverse team of first-generation female leaders, and we resonate with our target audience. Our team has collectively experienced the challenges of reskilling in the new workforce firsthand and is eager to make a difference.
Our diverse team at Symba brings together expertise on the future of work, top tier engineering talent, and a passion for empowering the next generation with key professional development opportunities in the workforce.
What type of organization is your solution team?
For-profit, including B-Corp or similar modelsHow many people are on your leadership team? (Of these, please provide the number of individuals from your leadership team that are full time, part time, and volunteer)
5 Leaders and all full-time team members of Symba.
What is the number of individuals from my leadership team that attended community college for at least one year?
2
In what year was your organization founded? How many years have you worked on your solution?
2017 and we have been working on Symba for 3 years.
Why are you and your team well-positioned to deliver this solution?
We started working on remote internships when everyone told us “remote internships would never happen.” Symba is the first mover to the market and the industry leader in the internship design. Our founding team has done over 30 internships combined and we are backed by leaders in HR and remote work. Symba is founded by a diverse team of first-generation female leaders, and we resonate with our target audience. Our team has collectively experienced the challenges of reskilling in the new workforce firsthand and is eager to make a difference.
Our team at Symba brings together expertise on the future of work, top tier engineering talent, and a passion for empowering the next generation with key professional development opportunities in the workforce.
- As an undergraduate student in Tucson, Arizona, Ahva Sadeghi experienced the hardship of not being able to access the career opportunities she was seeking. After many setbacks and continued dedication, she landed a remote internship opportunity with the Department of State, and this is where her passion for remote work was born. Ahva completed a total of 6 internships while in undergrad, all unpaid.
- As a software engineer student, Nikita Gupta was fortunate to land amazing paid remote internships with companies like Apple and Bank of America. She values these opportunities as they laid the foundation for her career journey.
- As a first generation college student and immigrant, Paula Mora had to take on extra part-time jobs to be able to afford 5 unpaid internships during her undergrad.
What organizations do you currently partner with, if any? How are you working with them?
Partners are an extension of the Symba team, and have been key to our growth. We have partnered with organizations that share Symba’s values, and who operate in our sector, or in related industries. The two main types of partnerships we have are channel partners and co-marketing partners. We have also partnered with universities in the US and Europe to grow our student base of talent.
Our channel partners are INROADS, CollegeRecruiter, Atrium Works, URx, TargetCW, Scholars, and JazzHR. We have established revenue share agreements with these partners where the partnership includes:
Benefit for Symba:
- Customer development
- Branding/exposure
- Media feature
- Events
Benefit for Partner
- Discounted rates for affiliates
- Revenue sharing percentage
- Media feature
- Events
Our co-marketing partners are Pay Our Interns, American Promise Alliance, Urban Alliance, Year Up, Moste, Students Rising Above, ITEA IDIOMAS, and Riipen. We have established these partnerships to promote each other's brands, this partnership includes:
Benefit for Symba
- Media feature
- Events
- Increased brand exposure and recognition
- Increased website traffic
- Content sharing
Benefit for Partner
- Media feature
- Events
- Increased brand exposure and recognition
- Content Sharing
What is your business model?
In Symba’s business model, we have two primary beneficiaries.
1. For Employers
Symba is a B2B Software as a Service platform. In our business model, we charge companies a subscription fee based on the number of users active on the Symba Internship Management Platform. Our engineering team provides best-in-class customer experience and success from a tailored onboarding experience to regular custom reporting.. Our customers have told us firsthand the benefits of Symba’s platform which include but are not limited to:
Up to 80% time saved in onboarding
Increase in conversion and retention rates
Increase in NPS scores
*In order to scale our impact and reach, we have offered our product in partnership to multiple nonprofits to support their internships pro bono as well.
2. For Students
Symba is an entirely free service for students and we offer them the following:
Access to paid remote internships on our job board, The Symba Slate.
Curated resources through our newsletter and blog designed for young professionals stepping into the workforce.
Invitations to key events and workshops with talent leaders on professional development and the future of work.
Our team conducts regular focus groups with employers and students to ensure that we can provide meaningful services and further develop our product to meet the needs of the ever-transforming workforce.
Do you primarily provide products or services directly to individuals, or to other organizations?
Organizations (B2B)What is your path to financial sustainability?
Our path to financial sustainability is a combination of sales of our products and raising investment capital.
Based on our financial projections, Symba will become a profitable company in Q4 of 2021.
*For additional information on our financial projections, please email us at founders@symba.io.
If you have raised funds for your solution or are generating revenue, please provide details.
Symba is a revenue generating startup in the early growth stage nearing $500K ARR. Many of our contracts cannot be disclosed publicly. For detailed information, please reach out to founders@symba.io.
Symba is a venture backed startup and recently closed a pre-seed round on a convertible note led by investors including 1517 Fund, Hustle Fund, and January Ventures. Symba has also participated in Techstars and Acceleprise. Symba has raised $750,000 to date.
*For more information, check out our feature on TechCrunch here.
If you seek to raise funds for your solution, please provide details.
We plan to raise $3 Million for our priced seed round in Q4 of 2021 to help us reach our next milestones of international growth and scale.
What are your estimated expenses for 2021?
According to our financial projections, Symba’s expenses are estimated at $2,129,545 for FY 2021.
*For a detailed breakdown of Symba’s 5 year projection, please email founders@symba.io.
Why are you applying to the Reimagining Pathways to Employment in the US Challenge?
We are thrilled about the opportunity to apply to the Reimagining Pathways to Employment in the US Challenge. In 2017, our team founded Symba on the very principles to innovate new avenues for talent to access career opportunities. In today’s remote climate, the time is now to accelerate and scale Symba’s impact. The resources provided by the Reimagining Pathways to Employment in the US Challenge would be invaluable for our team.
Through this opportunity, we are excited to leverage the validation pilots with the US Workforce Boards to put Symba in action at a larger scale in a community lead effort in the interior of the country. This would be a phenomenal learning opportunity for our team to better design meaningful programs for job-seekers across the country.
In addition, the capital afforded from the program will help us scale our operations and product to take Symba global. We will be able to scale at a much faster pace and support companies to launch and grow their programs.
Lastly, we are excited about the potential to leverage the incredible network of mentors and experts and give back to the community through our efforts.
In which of the following areas do you most need partners or support?
What organizations would you like to partner with, and how would you like to partner with them?
1. Recruitment Firms & Leaders in Early Talent Hiring
We’d like to partner with organizations like WayUp, internships.com, and Handshake, to provide complimentary services to each other's corporate partners. These organizations service recruitment for large internship programs and could become great channel partners.
2. Colleges and Universities
We’d also like to partner with universities across the country, like MIT, as well as community colleges like Miami Dade College (the largest undergraduate enrollment than any other college or university in the US). Collaborating with career services departments in colleges and universities will allow us to connect with corporate partners in need of internship tools, as well as a talented pool of students seeking internship opportunities. We are also looking to partner to support universities’ own internship and fellowship programs.
3. Social Impact Organizations Committed to Economic Empowerment
Lastly, we would like to further our network and partnership development with nonprofits and leading organizations that align with our mission to open up the workforce and democratize opportunities for students like our partners at INROADS. We are excited to further our social impact and work with leading organizations in the space.
4. Research Teams
As we advance our scale and impact, we’d like to team up with leading researchers to share our key findings and support research and development. We are currently working with The Center for Research on College-workforce Transitions on remote internships and would like to pave the way for more data collection in the industry.
Please explain in more detail here.
Our partnership goals at Symba are focused on building a strong network to:
1. Build integrations with existing softwares to support our customers with a seamless user experience.
2. Scale our growth and develop customer pipelines through referrals
3. Increase brand awareness and credibility
4. Participate in co-marketing engagements to create meaningful content for our audience on remote work and best practices in the industry
Solution Team
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Carlotta Bartolini Marketing Manager, Symba
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Nikita Gupta Co-Founder & CTO, Symba, Symba
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Mitra LeBuhn Head of Growth & Strategy, Symba
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Paula Mora Head of Business Development and Strategic Partnerships, Symba
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Ahva Sadeghi Co-Founder & CEO, Symba
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Solution Name:
Symba