Handshake Acquires Uplimit: AI Skilling Takes A New Direction

The explosive AI market is changing everything, and even Handshake, the leader in university recruiting and early career growth, is taking the bait. Today Handshake acquired Uplimit, one of the pioneers in AI-native corporate learning, with a goal of building a massive AI skills academy and job network for young workers.

I talked with Jonathan Stull, President, and Julia Stiglitz, Uplimit CEO and Co-Founder and they put it like this: “LinkedIn became the jobs, careers, and upskilling network for the digital age: we are the job and skilling network for the AI age.”

It’s kind of a compelling idea.

Handshake now has 25 million+ job seekers and young professionals in its network, and has direct relationships with more than 1,500 universities and 900,000 employers. Almost every college graduate joins Handshake to help them build a career and find a job, so the company has built a $150-200 Million business just providing job posting and seeking services for employers.

In the last year Handshake expanded dramatically into AI model training (similar to the business that Mercor, Surge, and Scale.ai do), enabling college students and experts to make hundreds of dollars per hour labelling and training AI models for many AI vendors. This “data labeling and AI training” market is over $7 billion already and is growing at 25-30% per year. There are more and more specialized AI systems to build, and each needs experts for training.

(In many ways the AI data labeling and AI training industry is one of experts loaning or giving away their skills for an hourly rate, and it can be as much as $300 per hour for deep skills.)

Some of the estimates project that Handshake already generates almost $1 Billion or more from this business, with half or more of the revenue going to the experts. But as you can see, the company is learning how to leverage its huge brand and user base to deliver more and more AI-related services. (And now competing with Mercor and Scale AI, Handshake’s ability to attract unique skills is powerful.)

Now add Uplimit and the company plans to offer a comprehensive free curriculum to help people learn how to use AI, build AI solutions, and use their AI projects to help them find work. LinkedIn does nothing like this at all.

And there’s more.

As Handshake competes with Mercor, Surge, and Scale AI for the AI data labeling and training market, the company gets smarter and smarter about AI-native learning. The company can not only assess job skills in detail for AI projects, they also have 20 PhDs building training and validation models to make sure their AI labeling is accurate. They can use this advanced reinforcement learning experience to build even better courses and learning experiences for its users. So the Handshake user base is likely to grow even faster.

Imagine if you’re looking for an AI expert to run your marketing department – you may find it hard to find a guru in this new, emerging space. You could presumably go to Handshake and find a professional who has built a whole AI marketing agent of their own, and you’d find them by trying out their product. This is Handshake’s idea – people will flock to Handshake to turbo-charge or re-align their career around AI. LinkedIn has nothing like this to offer.

Eventually they’ll monetize the training and offer similar content services to corporate buyers too.

Honestly, when I first heard of this I was concerned that Uplimit simply sold too early in their goal to win over the corporate learning market. Now that I hear more, I can see an interesting and expansive opportunity ahead in the new land of Handshake, “The Career Network for the AI Economy.”

I’ll keep you up to date on how this all goes.

Additional Information

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The Josh Bersin Institute, HR 2030, And The Global HR Excellence Certification.