Education Services Startup TalentSprint Raises $4M In Series A Funding From Nexus Venture Partners

Hyderabad-based skill development and training company TalentSprint Educational Services Pvt Ltd has raised Rs 20 crore ($4 million) in series A funding from Nexus Venture Partners. As part of the investment, Nexus Ventures' MD Anup Gupta will join the company's board.

Set up in 2009 by Madhumurty Ronanki, Santanu Paul and JA Chowdary, TalentSprint offers employability programmes to professionals, using experiential learning and iPEARL, its technology platform for the IT and BFSI sectors. The learning programmes are delivered to students, job-seekers and young professionals to make them job-ready.

According to Santanu Paul, CEO and managing director of TalentSprint, "India has tripled the number of higher education seats since 2000 and will do so again between now and 2020. However, quality has become a massive challenge. Our solution combines rich content, industry-experienced instructors and technology-aided delivery to provide meaningful employability outcome. The near-term goal is to integrate 100 colleges into the TalentSprint College Network."

The company has learning facilities in Hyderabad and Chennai, and claims to have 'graduated' around 3,000 professionals in the IT and BFSI sectors. It also aims to skill 500,000 graduates by 2020 and plans to bring more colleges on board from the rest of Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka in the near future.

"We are very pleased to back TalentSprint's strong management team and its innovative model that brings skill development and industry expertise to colleges and youth through smart use of technology. The goal is to enable up-skilling on a large scale without compromising on quality," said Gupta of Nexus Venture Partners.

For Nexus Ventures, this is the second investment in India this month. Around two weeks ago, it had led a $3.2 million funding round in social media benchmarking startup Unmetric. Nexus is one of the most active VC firms in the country and last year, bet on around 10 companies, committing over $60 million in total.