Excl: Online skill assessment startup Wheebox raising Series A from Lumis Partners, others

Gurgaon-based Integrated Learning Solution Pvt Ltd, which runs an online skill assessment venture under Wheebox.com, is close to raising its Series A funding in two months from existing investor Lumis Partners besides another investor, a senior company executive told Techcircle.

"We will be raising our Series A funding within two months and have already got consent from our existing investor Lumis Partners," said Nirmal Singh, founder & CEO, Wheebox. For more details on the funding, click .

Lumis Partners has also invested in companies such as TalentEdge and PeopleStrong in the e-learning space. The fund concentrates on sectors such as education and human capital services; service and supply chain management; and technology and consulting.

Started in April 2011, Wheebox offers a bouquet of validated tests, spanning areas such as language, cognitive, behavioural, information technology and general abilities as well as core domain skills in banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), engineering and retail. It offers assessment services solutions particularly to enterprises and academia. Wheebox is headquartered in Gurgaon and has offices in South Africa and the UK.

"At present, we are focused on the Delhi and NCR region. But eventually we want to use this funding to expand and open offices in Mumbai and Bangalore. We are also looking at international markets such as Dubai and Singapore for expansion," Singh said.

Currently, the company's business model is completely B2B; it has around 39 corporate clients across three sectors—BFSI, IT and manufacturing. But Singh has his reasons to concentrate and shift to the B2C model.

"We will be coming up with the B2C business this year because you cannot scale up this business by concentrating only on B2B. At present, we do 380,000 tests a year and we are aiming at 1 million tests for FY14," Singh said.

He explained that if the company concentrates only on B2B, it cannot scale up more than 5 lakh tests a year. It will expand into the B2C segment through social media and mobile.

"We will also be looking at retail and the hospitality sector as our potential clients. These are the sectors we are not very prominent at present," Singh said.

Another player in the online skill assessment space is Mettl which has raised from funding from Kalaari Capital and others.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)