POPSkul Acquired by Astronaut

After 9 months of incredible growth, POPSkul was acquired by Astronaut Technologies Pte Ltd, a Singapore & Indonesia based entity . I signed the papers last month, and its official, POPSkul is now part of Astronaut. POPSkul did a phenomenal job growing fast, but not fast enough for a one man show company. The news of the acquisition was announced early this month, from Tech In Asia to DailySocial, and local news outlets had an article on it.

POPSkul started with an idea, persuasion skills and almost no capital to begin with. The idea was to solve the problem of getting certification done digitally so it can be adopted into a digital world like today. The idea was simple, but the execution isn’t.

POPSkul grew to 600 test takers in just 2 months, over 2000 in 4 months, and grew rapidly with test takers using POPSkul for certification from all corners of Indonesia, to Asian countries like Taiwan and Hong Kong. 100-200 people took certification tests in one sitting, we were replacing test centers for skill certification tests.

Certification is not something you can do without a long process of security embedded into its process. As the name says, certified, which means the individual holding it has been tested fairly by professionals in a controlled and secured environment.

Test jockeys, cheating is a common problem in digital assessments. Making it happen needed a harmony of both reliable, robust, and secure technology with the co-operation on a legal entity entrusted legally to conduct certifications in a national and global scale.

I met Nigel from Astronaut in 2018, a month just after my exit from another startup. The Astronaut platform had the assessments ability that would fit nicely with POPSkul’s need for certification, and that is how it all started. POPSkul was a client of Astronaut that leverage the assessment tools needed to conduct certification tests. The addition was proctoring to add layers of security to make it hard for people to cheat on a test, or even be jockeyed. The proctoring literally saves your key strokes when you do the tests and records your every movement. AI will flag for any suspicious behaviours and reports to the assessors after the test. Astronaut’s ISO 27001 was a big plus for POPSkul to be green lit by the Ministry.

POPSkul was a client of Astronaut that leverage the assessment tools needed to conduct certification tests. The addition was proctoring to add layers of security to make it hard for people to cheat on a test, or even be jockeyed.

I am excited of this acquisition, and as shareholder I’ll be working as Astronaut’s Head of Marketing Communications to both spearhead marketing for Astronaut and POPSkul, creating an ecosystem for graduates to find jobs with all the support they need. Watch out world.

Other articles I found about the acquisition is listed below:
Kompas: https://www.kompas.com/edu/read/2021/08/07/113403171/astronaut-akuisisi-popskul-untuk-kembangkan-ekosistem-talenta-digital?page=all
CrunchBase: https://www.crunchbase.com/acquisition/astronaut-technologies-acquires-popskul–f2ef442c
Kontan: https://industri.kontan.co.id/news/astronaut-akuisisi-popskul-fokus-kembangkan-ekosistem-talenta-digital
Liputan6: https://www.liputan6.com/tekno/read/4625764/platform-rekrutmen-astronaut-akuisisi-popskul
Yahoo: https://id.berita.yahoo.com/platform-rekrutmen-astronaut-akuisisi-popskul-071502373.html