Kalaari-backed Simplilearn looking to acquire a corporate training firm; eyes $10M in next round

Online education and training destination for professional certification courses, Simplilearn is now looking to grow inorganically to expand further. It is also looking to raise another round of capital worth $10 million to fund its expansion plans.

Founded in 2009, Simplilearn offers online and classroom training in professional certification courses. It offers more than 50 courses in project management, IT services and IT security management, quality management, financial management and technology certification.

Run by Bangalore-based Simplilearn Solutions Pvt Ltd, Simplilearn has been growing at breakneck speed, according to Krishna Kumar, founder and CEO of the startup.

"We are growing at an enormous pace. We would be closing this financial year at about Rs 50 crore gross revenues. At an average we are training about 3,000 professionals monthly," Kumar said.

The company had raised around $3 million from Kalaari Capital (then known as Indo-US Ventures) in 2012.

Talking about traction, Kumar said though US is still the biggest market for Simplilearn, the company is seeing increased adoption from India as well.

Kumar said that in order to expand to B2C services, Simplilearn is looking to acquire a company in corporate training services. "Till now all our services have been B2C but now we want to get into B2B business as well. For this we are planning to acquire a fairly large company in corporate training," Kumar added.

When we last wrote about Simplilearn, it was offering about 50 courses and was looking to increase the number to 100. Kumar said that major traction comes from only 5-6 courses and hence Simplilearn is now looking at enhancing services for those courses rather than launching new ones. The company is also looking at converting the online courses to HTML5 to ensure access from all mobile phones.

(Edited by Prem Udayabhanu)