AdmitKard Raises INR 10 Cr In Pre-Series A Round Including the current round, the platform has raised a total of INR 17 crore. It has created a community of international students and students looking to study abroad
By Prabhjeet Bhatla •
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AdmitKard, an edtech platform that simplifies accessing higher education abroad, has raised INR 10 crore in pre-series A round. The round is majorly raised by founders of edtech platforms only that have participated in their personal capacity.
The round witnessed participation from the founders of renowned edtech startups like -Vamsi Krishna and Pulkit Jain of Vedantu, Mayank Kumar of upGrad, Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini and Sumit Jain of Unacademy, Tanushree Nagori, Aditya Shankar and Ravi Sekhar of DoubtNut, Akshay Saxena of Avanti, and other prominent investors including Pankaj Chaddah (ex-Zomato), Suhail Sameer and Dhruv Dhanraj Bahl of BharatPe, Vijay Arisetty (MyGate), Anand Chandrasekaran (ex-Snapdeal, Facebook), Sameer Guglani of Morpheus Gang, BCG Partners, MD of JPMorgan and others.
"During the pandemic, we realized that students were not able to travel abroad due to the closed international borders. Hence we doubled down our effort on ensuring the students' experience in our long drawn funnel gets better. To enable that we realized the guidance to the students' needs to be product-driven instead of being dependent on humans. We sought guidance from our mentors from other edtech companies and de-skilled the entire counseling process, solving a major problem of counselors in this industry," said Rachit Agrawal, co-founder, AdmitKard.
The pandemic certainly wreaked havoc on the startup industry, however, edtech has been one of the sectors to witness growth in traction. The sector moving towards holistic growth has exhibited a mutually beneficial approach in this fundraise where ed-tech founders have come forward to participate in fundraise by AdmitKard.
"I have been a mentor to Rachit and Piyush for a long time now and have seen the journey of AdmitKard. Their focus on productizing student guidance and de-skilling the role of a counselor is a big win as it solves a very fundamental problem of talent quality and standardization at scale. I am happy to be a part of their growth journey," added Vamsi Krishna, co-founder, Vedantu.
"AdmitKard has chosen the right category that has been waiting to be disrupted and addressing it with great service, unlocking desired value for students. The team is well placed to disrupt the space which is unorganized and dominated by offline players with a great PMF and strong plans to scale and hence have decided to back it," commented Ravi Shekhar KV, co-founder DoubtNut.
"As someone who has studied abroad extensively and understands the challenges one faces from discovering the right program to arriving on campus, I am excited about what AdmitKard is building. Their product-first approach to democratizing access to global education is what our youth need today," shared Dhruv Dhanraj Bahl, chief operating officer, BharatPe.
Including the current round, the startup has raised a total of INR 17 crore. It has created a strong community of international students and students looking to study abroad. They have already served students from 26 states in India through their platform and have also served few students from multiple other countries like Sri Lanka, Nepal, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Vietnam.
"We witnessed an 1100 percent hike in the number of queries pouring in. We have seen spectacular growth and kudos to our automation, we were able to handle them well. Now the focus is on growth and hence we would be raising a bigger round. This is more like a mentors and well-wishers round. We are fortunate to have credible names from the edtech sector itself and other marquee angels backing us today. We have touched ARR of ~$2 million in the month of June 2021 and are on track to hit ARR of ~$8 million by March 2022," noted Piyush Bhartiya, founder, and chief executive officer, AdmitKard.
The company is scaling at a fast pace, having counseled over 25000 students, processing around 12000 applications, and boasting a strong portfolio of over 2300 universities across the globe.
