Bengaluru: Online college and exam portal CollegeDekho.com, run by Girnarsoft Education Services Pvt Ltd, on Tuesday said it has received funding worth $8 million in a new round, which saw capital infusion from Girnarsoft along with participation from existing investor Man Capital LLC, a London-based private equity investor.
This is Man Capital’s second investment in CollegeDekho. In April 2016, Man Capital and GrinarSoft led a $2 million pre-Series A round in CollegeDekho.
CollegeDekho helps connect students with prospective colleges and makes searching for colleges and courses across the country easier. It also provides information on competitive and entrance exams, and helps students apply for them through a single portal on its website.
Ruchir Arora, chief executive officer, CollegeDekho told Mint that it would use the current funding to invest in technology, scale up services to new geographies, and for research and development.
“Even today there are some 14 lakh students that take IIT-JEE entrance exams. And throughout my experience in education, I’m sure that at least 20-30% of them may have wished to be a designer or enter the creative field. Our goal is to intervene here and help guide those 20-30% students," said Arora in a telephonic interview.
CollegeDekho currently lists course and college information from over 36,000 educational institutions, added Arora. It also has a direct tie-up with 400 institutes for a common application form (CAF) feature that can be used by students to apply to multiple colleges using a single form.
Arora said the availability of cheap mobile data has helped increase is site traffic by around 300-400% every year, over the last two years.
Grinarsoft capital infusion into CollegeDekho comes at a time when education startups in India have seen an uptick in investor attention mostly from foreign investors. Mint reported on Monday that Eupheus Learning was in advanced talks to raise around $10-$15 million for its Series A round.
Bengaluru-based Byju’s, had last raised $540 million, in a funding round led by South African internet giant Naspers. Its valuation currently exceeds over $5 billion.
