28%.
That’s the international share of Batch 2026 placement offers.
72% were domestic.
The Student Success Report documents both numbers alongside a named list: students, company logos, country flags. Not a claim. A list you can look at.
Here’s what I want to explain about that 28%.
What “international” means in this context
International offers can mean different things in different placement reports.
At Kalvium, the documented figure refers to companies that extended job offers for roles outside India, or international companies running a non-domestic hiring process. The Success Report shows names, companies, and country flags. It’s not a composite estimate.
Four students from that report give you a concrete picture.
Navaneeth, at Yellow.ai. Akash, at Medable. Piyush, at 7-Eleven. Chandan, at Swiftlabs.
Each is a real company with a real engineering team. Yellow.ai is a conversational AI company operating across multiple geographies. Medable builds clinical trial technology. 7-Eleven runs a significant engineering operation behind its global retail footprint. Swiftlabs is in software development.
None of these are token partnerships. These are companies with the option to hire locally in their home markets. When they extend offers to students in India, it means those students cleared the same technical bar as candidates anywhere else.
Why international companies hire from India
I want to be honest about this.
International hiring from India isn’t unusual. It’s been happening for decades. What varies is which Indian students pass the screen.
Here’s the thing: international companies that hire from Indian college batches aren’t doing it because Indian engineers are nearby. They’re doing it because specific students in the batch can do the job. The screening process for an international hire is at least as rigorous as a domestic one, often more so. There’s more friction. More coordination. More overhead.
A company extending an international offer is making a real bet.
Navaneeth at Yellow.ai, working in conversational AI, got there because he’d been building real systems since his first year. The technical bar for a conversational AI company isn’t low. You can’t talk your way through it.
Akash at Medable, in clinical trial technology, passed that process too. Medable isn’t a famously easy hiring loop.
That’s not marketing. That’s what happens when the bar is real and the students are ready.
What you can and can’t take from 28%
I want to be careful here.
28% is a cohort figure. It tells you what the batch produced collectively. It doesn’t predict what any individual student will experience.
If your primary goal is working in India, 72% domestic is the more directly relevant number. Those offers include Morgan Stanley, PhonePe, Thoughtworks, Lowe’s, Tata 1mg, Maersk, Rupeek, Clari, and Raksul, among 40 or more recruitment partners. That’s not a lesser outcome.
If international is a goal, the 28% is documented and real. But it’s not a number you should project onto yourself individually. The students who landed international roles spent four years building things real enough to hold up in those hiring loops. The outcome followed the work. That order matters.
82.40% of Batch 2026 was placed as of March 2026, with a median of Rs 16.5 LPA. 28% of those offers were international. Both numbers come from the same Success Report, same methodology, same source.
What this tells you about the programme
The 28% is interesting because of what it implies about the programme’s structure.
International companies run detailed, multi-round technical processes. They’re not selecting on college brand or CGPA alone. They’re asking: can you explain a system you built end to end? Can you debug a problem you haven’t seen before? Can you work inside a codebase you didn’t write?
Those are the same questions Venkat and I watched students fail at FACE Prep, which we previously co-founded, across 2,000+ institutions and 6 million students in campus recruitment training. When students showed up never having shipped anything real, the best interview coaching had a ceiling. You can’t close a four-year doing gap in three months of preparation.
Students who passed international hiring loops at Yellow.ai and Medable had been shipping real software since Year 1. The DOJO system runs daily coding practice six days a week. From Year 2, students work on live projects with industry partners. By the time a hiring loop happens, the portfolio of real work already exists.
That’s the most honest explanation I have for the 28%.
The programme isn’t optimised for international hiring specifically. It’s optimised for building engineers who can do real work. The international share is a downstream effect of that.
The 72% deserves its own honest look
Here’s something I don’t want to skip over.
72% domestic means the majority of Batch 2026 placed into Indian companies, including some of the strongest engineering employers in the country.
Morgan Stanley’s India engineering team isn’t a soft landing. PhonePe runs at India-scale payments infrastructure with some of the most demanding uptime requirements in the market. Thoughtworks, Lowe’s, Rupeek: real engineering roles with real standards.
The Batch 2026 sector spread, which the companion post on where Kalvium graduates end up working covers in detail, shows nine sectors with no single one above 20%. AI and Data leads at 19.4%. IT Services at 17.7%. SaaS at 16.1%. HealthTech at 12.9%. FinTech at 11.3%.
Nine sectors. No concentration risk. That’s a batch that could go in multiple directions, not one that was funnelled into a single lane.
The 72% domestic spread sits inside that picture. It’s not a population of students who didn’t get international offers. It’s a population of students who placed into the full breadth of the domestic market, across sectors that have very different technical demands.
The floor is the number I care most about
The figure I care about most isn’t the 28% or the median.
It’s the floor.
The floor was Rs 15 LPA. That’s what the programme produced for the students who weren’t the outliers. Not the Google Summer of Code winner. Not the hackathon sweep. The student with average CGPA who’d spent four years building real things and could walk an interviewer through every decision.
The 28% international tells you about the ceiling of what was possible. The floor tells you whether the design worked for the full batch, not just the best twenty percent.
A high floor alongside a 28% international share, from the same cohort and the same programme, means the engineering built here travels. Domestically and internationally.
Both things are true at once.
Reading this alongside the rate and the spread
The companion post on where Kalvium graduates end up working covers the sector spread: what nine sectors with no single one above 20% actually means, and what it tells you about the kind of engineering the programme builds.
Manik’s post on how to read Kalvium’s placement numbers honestly covers the rate methodology and the denominator question.
International share, sector spread, placement rate: all three come from the same Success Report. You need all three to read the picture clearly. No single number is the whole story.
What the 28% tells you, specifically, is that the engineering this programme builds passes hiring bars beyond India’s domestic market. International roles from Indian college batches aren’t the norm. Not because the engineers can’t do the work. Because the four years before the hiring loop usually didn’t build toward it.
The students in that 28% didn’t show that gap.
Rajesh is a co-founder of Kalvium. Rajesh and Venkat previously co-founded FACE Prep, where they worked with 2,000+ institutions across India. He writes about what it takes to produce engineers who can do real work, and what the data from real batches actually tells you.