WorldLink MD Dileep Agrawal personally invests in Skill Lab Asia to drive its growth in South East Asia

Kathmandu born AI-powered education-to-employment platform — accelerating transformation across Rankings, Employability, Compliance, and Institutional Intelligence in South and Southeast Asia.

The Investment

Mr. Dileep Agrawal, Managing Director of WorldLink Communications Limited — the company that connected Nepal to the internet — has personally made an investment in Skill Lab Asia, the Kathmandu-born AI-powered digital platform tackling one of Asia’s most stubborn structural challenges: the gap between what education produces and what employers actually need.

The investment targets expansion across Nepal and five Southeast Asian markets — Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam — where education-to-employment pathways remain broken and graduate underemployment is structural, not cyclical.

Asia’s Education-to-Employment Gap Stems From Inadequate Digital Infrastructure.

Today, Skill Lab Asia’s digital platform is the only solution that connects student-readiness directly to the outcomes that matter most to institutions: UGC mandates, QS/THE rankings trajectory, graduate employability benchmarks, MOHE/MQA/OBE compliance, and real-time executive intelligence. Operating across 300+ institutional partners, 700+ hiring partners, and 150+ mentors in Nepal, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Vietnam — Skill Lab serves every stakeholder in the institution simultaneously.

What the Capital Unlocks

The investment funds three strategic workstreams:

• ASEAN Acceleration: Scaling proven product-market fit in Malaysia and the Philippines, with active pipeline development in Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.
• Nepal Deepening: Expanding institutional coverage across higher education, TVET, and K-12, anchored by provincial government partnerships.
• Platform Intelligence: Advancing AI-driven talent and skills infrastructure — from rankings automation to compliance evidence generation — to serve institutions and employers at regional scale.

“Investment from Dileep Dai is more than capital — it’s catalytic on many fronts. This will help us scale Skill Lab’s solutions into Southeast Asia while deepening our work with universities, TVET institutions, schools, and governments to accelerate education-to-employment transformation at scale.” – Team Skill Lab Asia.

A Signal to the Market

Mr. Agrawal’s trust on Skill Lab Asia is a strategic validation of a thesis long held by the Skill Lab team: that improving educational outcomes and building commercially viable talent infrastructure are not competing goals — they are the same goal. Unlike consumer edtech, Skill Lab Asia’s model is built on long-cycle institutional B2B contracts with governments, universities, and corporates, creating infrastructure-grade revenue that compounds rather than churns.

For Nepal’s emerging technology ecosystem — long overlooked by regional venture capital — the investment may also signal something larger: that world-class solutions built in Kathmandu can compete, and win, across Asia.

About Skill Lab Asia

Skill Lab Asia is an AI-powered education-to-employment digital SaaS platform founded in Kathmandu, Nepal in 2019. The platform connects student-readiness directly to colleges/universities Rankings, Employability, Compliance, and Institutional Intelligence — all in one platform. With 300+ institutional partners, 700+ hiring partners, and 150+ mentors, Skill Lab Asia serves universities, TVET institutions, K-12 schools, and corporates across Nepal, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand and is part of the Chamber of Commerce in these respective countries.