Edusys Raises $7.5M From Sequoia Capital

Bangalore-based online education training and certification company Edusys Services Pvt Ltd has raised $7.5 million (Rs 38 crore) from Sequoia Capital. With this round of funding, Edusys aims to expand its business by introducing new products and strengthening its core team and technology platform.

Launched in 2004, Edusys currently has a customer base of more than 3,500 companies globally and supports students from over 150 countries. It offers specific courses and tests, which span a vast spectrum of conventional and emerging domains of learning and work. The company has offices in the USA, the UK, Singapore and Australia besides Bangalore and Bhubaneswar in India.

Edusys focuses on areas like project management, six sigma, HR, risk management and negotiations, and offers services through its brands PMstudy.com, 6sigmastudy.com, RMstudy.com, NGstudy.com, PROJstudy.com, HRDstudy.com, PROGstudy.com and ITILstudy.com.

According to Tridibesh Satpathy, founder and CEO of Edusys, the test prep and certification market is a $48 billion global industry and the firm sees tremendous opportunity for growth. The company is planning to double its workforce next year.

"Edusys has created a technology platform which delivers high quality courses through a virtual delivery model that is cost effective and highly scalable. The courses are designed to provide maximum flexibility to students with innovative training styles and easy accessibility," said Satpathy.

Satpathy started his career as a business analyst at TCS in the mid-90s and later worked for UTI before floating his first venture ExcelatExams in March 1999. The firm specialised in training students for MBA group discussions and interviews, and was sold to Mumbai-based IMS one year after its launch. Satpathy then worked for Cognizant, IBM and American Express before starting Edusys.

"More than 100,000 students have already benefited from the education delivery model of Edusys and we expect this number to grow significantly in the future," said G V Ravishankar, managing director of Sequoia Capital.

"The robust learning management system and sound back office processes have enabled this scalability and helped the company offer a variety of courses at far superior value relative to competition, spanning different domains within professional education," he added.

This is Sequoia's fifth investment in India since January 1. The investment firm, which has been one of the more consistent and active early-stage and growth capital investor for the past few years, has earlier invested in Bright Lifecare Pvt Ltd (which runs the online health store Healthkart.com), Cloud telephony start-up Knowlarity Communications and Mumbai-based Accelyst Solutions Pvt Ltd (which runs Freecharge.in, an 18-month-old recharge portal), and also put in fresh money in the existing portfolio company Ujjivan, a microfinance firm.