Springboard, an EdTech startup which provides professional courses along with one-to-one mentoring has raised $9.5 million in Series A funding led by Costanoa Ventures. Blue Fog Capital, Rocketship.vc, Moneta Ventures, Learn Capital and Jyoti Bansal, the founder of Appdynamics also participated in the funding round. The company is also backed by eminent investors like Allen Blue, co-founder of LinkedIn, Naveen Tewari, founder & CEO of InMobi, Facebook’s former VP-Product Greg Badros.
Started in 2013 by Parul Gupta and Gautam Tambay, the company has educated over 7,000 students in its intensive three-to-six months courses in data science, UX design, and business analytics. Its user base comes from all over 80 countries. It has over 350 professionals from some famous business organizations like Amazon, Airbnb, Uber and McKinsey. With the newly acquired funding, the Banglore based startup will expand into more geographies within India as well as upgrade its technology. According to the company, they will improve their personalized learning programme and build a “world-class alumni community”.
In December, Springboard (previously known as SlideRule) acquired $1.7 million in a seed funding round in December 2015. By the end of 2018, the company is planning to double its headcount which is currently at 40 across its San Francisco HQ and India.
Recently, a number of EdTech startups have raised capital. In November, Meritnation raised around $5.8 million from Info Edge which raised its stake to 65.67%. A Delhi-based startup NoPaperForms raised $871k from Naukri, Shiksha, 99acres and Jeevansathi among others. In the same month, another Delhi-based startup Leverage Edu raised an undisclosed amount from Indifi Technologies co-founder Alok Mittal, Innov8 founder Ritesh Malik and others. In September, Banglore-based online education platform Unacademy raised $11.5 million from Sequoia. In July, Byju’s learning also raised an undisclosed amount from China’s Tencent Holdings Ltd in July taking the total funding to $200 million.
KPMG-Google released a report in May 2017 which disclosed that education market is expected to touch $1.96 billion by 2021. Online certification courses and re-skilling account around 38% of the higher education market. A number of online training startups in India have shifted their focus from university-based curriculum to a more industry-oriented training approach for their courses.