Mumbai Angels Investing Up To Rs 5Cr In Bangalore-based Start-up eDreams Edusoft

Mumbai Angels will invest up to Rs 5 crore ($1 million) in two year old disruptive technology product startup focused on the education industry eDreams Edusoft. The company's products are driven by innovations across technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, NLP and speech processing.

Bangalore-based eDreams was founded by Rajeev Pathak who also serves at its CEO. Pathak is an IIM Bangalore and BITS Pilani alumnus who was GM – software products Group at Wipro (handling $100 million business) prior to starting his own firm.

Pathak started the company with other members from IITs/IIMs including CTO Suryaprakash Konanuru, who has in the past co-founded firms such as Yos Technologies and Alopa Networks.

His team has built a patent pending product called 'FunToot' which is an intelligent personal tutor that can observe, assess, diagnose, interact, encourage and help every child depending upon the child's multiple intelligence and other characteristics.

The funding from Mumbai Angels came as a part of Pathak winning The Pitch- Season 2, a business reality show aired on BloombergUTV.

Harsh Mariwala, CMD of Marico Ltd (who judged the final round) said, "It's been a fascinating experience to engage with the future change makers of the society. Rajeev's business model was very innovative and he is leveraging on a social need- that of shortage of teachers, where there is a need to actually reinforce learning and making it fun."

The second season of The Pitch had industry stalwarts like Ronnie Screwvala of UTV Group, R Gopalakrishnan of Tata Sons, Ajay & Sanjeev Bijli of the PVR Group, Rajiv Bajaj of Bajaj Auto, Mahesh Bhupathi of Globosport, Neeraj Roy of Hungama.com, Ranjit Yadav of Samsung India, Rahul Akerkar of Indigo chain of restaurants, Surinder Kapur of the SONA Group and Harsh Mariwala of Marico Ltd as judges.

The participants were judged on their business acumen, ability to be a team player, innovative thinking, sense of fair play and mental strength and at the end of each episode one contestant was eliminated.