Online education start-up Edureka has raised $2 million in its first round of funding from venture fund Leo Capital India as it seeks to achieve growth targets and bring senior leadership on board, the company said on Thursday.
Till now, the Bengaluru-based start-up was run on the ₹1.5 crore infused by its founders at inception.
Rajul Garg, founder and managing partner of Leo Capital India, has joined the board of Edureka, run by Brain4ce Education Solutions Pvt. Ltd, the company said. Garg is an entrepreneur turned investor who founded companies such as Pine Labs and GlobalLogic.
Edureka plans to utilize the funds to increase revenues by six times in the next three years. “With this investment, we will continue to focus on scaling up our team, enhancing our core product and improving customer experience to achieve our target of achieving 6x growth in the next three years. We’re also excited to welcome veteran investor and serial entrepreneur Rajul Garg into the company,” said Lovleen Bhatia, co-founder & chief executive officer, Edureka.
The education-tech start-up has grown three times in the last three years. Skilling and online certification courses are currently the dominant category with a 38% share, according to a joint report by Google and KPMG. The e-learning industry is expected to hit the $2 billion mark by 2021, according to the report.
“We have long believed in the growth potential of e-learning, especially when it comes to bridging the skill-gap in the IT industry. Edureka is uniquely positioned to meet the demand for quality technical training, as demonstrated by their remarkable growth since inception. We are confident that they will capitalise on the global demand to become the dominant player in this market and we look forward to helping them achieve this goal,” said Garg.
The e-learning-startup has nearly 700,000 professionals and students on board led by US, which contributes more than 40% of its learner base, followed by India. It said it generated revenue of Rs18 crore from 2011-2014, the first three years of the company’s operation.
Founded in 2011, Edureka is a global training platform in technologies such as Big Data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence and block chain among others. It competes with other foreign and Indian e-learning companies such as Coursera, Simplilearn, Udacity and Udemy.
Source: Reuters.com