Bangalore-based eDreams Edusoft raises $2M from Inventus Capital Partners, Mumbai Angels

eDreams Edusoft Pvt Ltd, a Bangalore-based technology product startup focused on the education industry, has raised $2 million in its second round of funding, led by Inventus Capital Partners. Existing investor Mumbai Angels also participated in the round.

The funds will be primarily used to expand the company's reach across the country. The startup currently has a presence in 20 cities and towns of India.

Commenting on the development, Rajeev Pathak, founder and CEO of eDreams Edusoft, said, "With support from the existing investor and our new partner, we aim to reach out to millions of students by rapidly expanding to new geographies."

The startup was founded by Pathak in 2010. He is an alumnus of IIM Bangalore and BITS Pilani alumnus, and earlier worked as general manager (software products group) at Wipro, handling $100 million business. Pathak started the company with Suryaprakash Konanuru (CTO and VP engineering), who has co-founded companies such as Yos Technologies and Alopa Networks. Konanuru holds an M.Tech in Computer Science from IIT Bombay.

The startup's products are driven by innovations across technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and speech processing. It currently offers its flagship product Funtoot to thousands of Indian students and plans to reach millions in the next five years. Funtoot is an intelligent, adaptive and personalised digital teacher for K-12 students. It basically observes, assesses, diagnoses, interacts, encourages and teaches each student, based on individual characteristics.

The idea behind Funtoot is to eliminate the learning deficit in each student as the homogeneous nature of modern classroom teaching/learning fails to address individual requirements. The company deploys this tech product via a hybrid cloud-computing model that can be used in school and at home.

According to the company, with almost 50 per cent of the population below 25 years, the education industry will be one of the fastest growing sectors in India. The surge in the adoption of broadband internet and digitalisation in the education space will only add to that.

"Paying individual attention to each child and ensuring personalised learning are some of the biggest challenges of the modern schooling system. Funtoot is a significant innovation for addressing this challenge," said Rutvik Doshi, principal at Inventus Capital Partners.

Early last year, the company won 'The Pitch-Season 2', a business reality show aired on BloombergUTV, and as a part of that, it received a commitment of Rs 5 crore in funding (over a span of two years) from Mumbai Angels.

Other investments in the education sector in 2013

May 22: Jaipur-based Intap Labs Pvt Ltd, which runs a cloud-based online language learning platform called CultureAlley, raised a seed round from Mumbai-based early-stage VC fund Kae Capital.

Feb 25: Info Edge (India) Ltd, the largest consumer internet firm in India by market value, infusedan additional Rs 30 crore ($5.5 million) in Applect Learning Systems, which runs an online education and assessment venture through Meritnation. The deal valued Meritnation at around Rs 303 crore ($56 million). With the fresh investment, Info Edge's total exposure to Applect rose to Rs 61.5 crore and it now holds around 54 per cent stake in Applect.

Feb 23: Bangalore-based education technology startup Carveniche secured an angel funding of around Rs 1 crore from Mumbai Angels.

Feb 6: Learnpedia, a startup that provides digital learning solutions to students preparing for engineering entrance exams, received an undisclosed amount in funding from Ixora Ventures, a Delhi-based early-stage venture fund.

(Edited by Sanghamitra Mandal)