Short live projects from local MSMEs, assessed by faculty for internship credit
TL;DR Livebrief runs 6–8 week live projects for students at tier-2 and tier-3 colleges. It finds small local firms with a real problem, cuts each into a project a student team can finish, and gives faculty a rubric so the work counts as internship credit. The college pays. The firm gives a few hours of a manager's time.
Students in smaller cities are drifting away from degrees that don't lead anywhere. AISHE 2023-24 shows undergraduate enrolment fell by 93,321, the first drop since 2011[1]. Supply of placements isn't the gap either. The AICTE internship portal lists over 79 lakh internships from 83,170 companies[2].
So where's the gap? Finishing. In the PM Internship Scheme pilot, roughly 82,000 offers led to about 28,000 acceptances and only 8,700 young people actually joining[3]. A listing doesn't help a student in a small district town with no large employer nearby, and a two-day online "virtual internship" teaches very little that an interviewer can probe.
The seed pitched a platform connecting students with real-world projects, and I've reframed it. Listings already exist in the lakhs and they're free, so another marketplace would fight the government for the same students. Livebrief sells completion instead.
A Livebrief coordinator signs up 20–40 small firms around one college cluster - a garment exporter that needs a costing sheet, a clinic chain with a messy appointment log, a transporter that wants route data cleaned. Each problem becomes a scoped brief with a fixed deliverable, a weekly 30-minute check-in with the owner and a rubric. Teams of three work for 6–8 weeks. Faculty mentors grade against the rubric, the firm signs off and the college records credit under its own internship rules.
The UGC issued internship guidelines for undergraduates in February 2024[4], and AICTE has had an internship policy since 2019[5]. Each university still decides what counts, so Livebrief works inside that decision rather than replacing it.
The college pays a per-student or per-cohort fee, because it needs internships it can document for students, parents and accreditation reviewers. The MSME pays nothing at first, and its cost is the owner's time. The rate is an assumption to test. Nobody publishes what colleges spend on placement and training vendors. One Canadian work-integrated learning platform runs this model - free for employers, sold to institutions through demos[6].
The UGC's 2024 internship guidelines and its March 2025 apprenticeship-embedded degree guidelines push internships inside the degree[4]. The AICTE portal targets one crore internships by 2027 and ties credits to the Academic Bank of Credits[2]. The PM Internship Scheme pays ₹5,000 a month[7], which has raised student expectations for real work. Colleges now need supervised, gradeable experience in volume.
There's no public figure for spending on supervised project internships in India. The bottom-up anchors are 53,354 colleges in the AISHE directory[8], most outside metros, and over 4.77 crore Udyam-registered MSMEs as of July 2024[9]. I couldn't find the tier-2 and tier-3 share of colleges. The government's own target of one crore internships[2] is adjacent, and it's a policy goal, not a market.
The AICTE internship portal and the big private internship boards list opportunities at scale for free[2][10]. One Indian training company runs AICTE-linked virtual internships for member institutes[12]. A US platform offers free, self-paced job simulations built by employers[11]. The Canadian platform is the closest model, embedding employer projects inside courses[6]. The gap in India is the coordinator on the ground who turns a local firm's mess into a gradeable project.
| Difficulty | Moderate (36/100) |
| Starting capital | ₹45–85 L |
| Time to launch | 4–6 months |
The software is simple. The work is human, which means keeping 30 busy owners responsive for eight weeks, writing briefs that are neither trivial nor impossible and getting faculty to grade consistently. Every new city means rebuilding the employer bench from scratch, one association meeting at a time.
No business licence is needed to run this service. What matters is whether each university accepts the credit.
Building this outside India? The categories above usually have a local equivalent, so check with your own regulator.
Don't let AI grade students or decide credit. Faculty and the university own those calls, and the firm signs off on its own project.
Want to work out the AI layer for Livebrief? Talk to Yash →
I'd back a founder with a college-sales background who enjoys field operations in one region. If you're hoping to scale nationally from an app then this isn't for you. Before raising, prove two things - that one college will pay for a 100-student cohort and that at least 80% of teams finish with the firm's sign-off.
Plan for roughly ₹45–85 L. The software is simple, so most of it pays for coordinators building an employer bench around each college cluster.
No business licence. You do need to fit UGC or AICTE internship rules so each university will count the credit, and follow the DPDP Act on student data.
Yes, a Canadian platform already runs a similar model in Canada. Check how local universities award credit for work-based projects.
The free Livebrief validation kit has the line-by-line capital breakdown, the effort scoring, the internship-credit and data-protection checklist, a 14-day validation sprint with pass/fail targets, a 90-day launch plan, 10 interview questions for colleges and MSME owners, and 5 assumptions to test. Download the kit →
Thinking about building Livebrief or something close to it? The make-or-break work is keeping small-firm owners engaged until the last week of every project, and I'd be glad to help you design for that. If you need a hand, you know where to find me. Talk to Yash →
For illustration only. Names are fictional and ideas hypothetical; sourced facts are real but may be out of date. Nothing here is legal, financial or professional advice, and Yash Khatri is not personally liable for any use of it. Read the full disclaimer.