Meet the first class of LinkedIn’s Creator Accelerator Program in India
In February, we launched the Creator Accelerator Program in India as part of LinkedIn’s $25 million investment in creators globally. Today, I’m pleased to introduce the first India class of this 10-week incubator program — 200 creators from diverse professional and demographic backgrounds with a unique story to tell and a mutual passion to build meaningful communities. These creators endorse a wide range of professional topics across the world of work such as ethical Artificial Intelligence, entrepreneurship, semiconductors, financial literacy, health & wellbeing and more.
Creators are the lifeblood of our platform — the content and conversations they create go a long way in creating opportunities for others across the LinkedIn community. The program includes creators like Language Quality Manager Raju Gupta (राजू गुप्ता) who wants to create Hindi content to help people get the right skills to land the right opportunities, or Kalki Subramaniam a prominent transgender rights activist who wants to create short videos featuring transgender persons who broke gender stereotypes and built successful careers. Rida Malik Mubeen wants to have conversations with women in STEM and build inclusivity in Science & Technology fields; while Uttam Gupta wants to make education fun and engaging and teach people how to build a $20 million business in the leanest way, and shortest time, possible.
Today, India is the fastest growing market on LinkedIn, with 88 million Indian members on the platform. Interestingly, we are poised to achieve even greater levels of member engagement as the Indian creator community continues to grow stronger on the platform. Our 10-week Creator Accelerator Program will offer coaching, networking opportunities, and a financial grant to help our 200 creator participants amplify their voice, grow their communities, share content, and spark meaningful conversations.
As part of the program, our 200 participants will also receive guidance from four LinkedIn creators serving as our program mentors: Nearbuy.com Founder Ankur Warikoo, Nas Academy CEO Nuseir Yassin, Le15 Patisserie Founder and CEO Pooja Dhingra and MD & CEO of Edelweiss AMC Radhika Gupta. We’re also partnering with some best-in-class content creation tools including Canva, descript, Restream and Streamyard to support our participants in their creation, and providing each person with production tools including Pivo starter packs.
We received thousands of applications that displayed incredible levels of creativity and innovation. We were amazed by how deeply committed each applicant was to giving back and making a meaningful impact. Our final 200 participants in India represent diverse voices who are dedicated to building communities, expanding their networks, and sparking meaningful, informative conversations.
Nearly half of participants are women who will draw on their personal experiences to create content that demonstrates the power of inclusion and representation across industries. A sizable portion of participants also hail from non-metro cities and are keen to make their voices heard and bring different local flavors to content creation. More than 1 in 3 (34%) participants selected English and Hindi as preferred creation languages, and a similar share (33%) expressed an intent to create more content in Hindi. And lastly, niche creators, podcast hosts, entrepreneurs, and students are some of the top creator categories of our participants, which promises to bring in a wealth of fresh content and conversations.
Anyone who has a story to tell and is driving professional conversations can be a creator on LinkedIn. For all those that were not selected, LinkedIn will still be supporting their creator journey via regular email updates that relay best practices and content ideas for our platform.
Our hope is to launch other cohorts in the future, so please stay tuned for more! But it’s important to us to support all creators. If you’d like to receive regular updates from our team on trending topics, new features and the latest tips for creation, you can sign up here. You can also find more resources here, and be sure to follow the Creator Weekly newsletter and LinkedIn For Creators page to learn more about future opportunities, new tools and great ways to create content on LinkedIn.
Congratulations to the creators in the first class of LinkedIn’s Creator Accelerator Program in India. Follow them on LinkedIn below to know more about their creation journeys:
Meghna Singhal
