Corporate training SaaS platform HandyTrain gets $1 mn

Goa-based Handy Training Technologies Pvt Ltd, which owns HandyTrain, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform on mobile, has secured $1 million from various investors, according to a company press statement.

HandyTrain is a platform that lets companies create and deploy programmes to train 50 to 25,000 people. The company claims to have crossed more than 20,000 paid users within a year of launching.

The startups' clients include Uber, Cipla, Airtel, Kotak, ICICI Prudential and Future Group's HomeTown.

The investors who took part in this round include Silver Range Investments of Hong Kong, digital content firm Lumina Datamatics, Shun Yoshida, managing director of Bank of America, Mahesh Murthy, founder and managing partner of SeedFund, R. Ramaraj, former CEO of Sify and co-founder of The Chennai Angels, Siddharth Parekh, founder of private equity fund Paragon Partners, Avtar Monga, chief operating officer of IDFC Bank, BS Nagesh, vice chairman of Shopper's Stop and Gautham Pai, managing director of the Manipal Group.

Gourav Jaswal, Director of HandyTrain said in a statement that, "Corporate training is a market of staggering size. For instance, a year ago Accenture spent about $840 million on training their 375,000 employees globally. That's effectively over $2,000 (nearly Rs 1.5 lakh) per employee per year."

He added, "Training is a universal service and therefore the addressable market for HandyTrain is eye-popping in scale."

HandyTrain was born at Prototyze, a Goa-based incubator that has also catalysed a clutch of other companies, including Mobiefit, a mobile fitness company, TempoGo, a transportation technologies venture, Seynse, a financial technology company that operates a digital lending platform called Loan Singh.

Earlier this month, Chennai-based SaaS provider Zarget had raised $6 million (Rs 40 crore) in its Series A round of funding, led by venture capital firm Sequoia Capital India.

Last month, a SaaS startup EPaathSala, run by Bengaluru-based Kahan Technologies Pvt. Ltd, had raised an undisclosed amount in its pre-Series A round of investment led by Hyderabad Angels.

EPaathSala provides cloud-based solutions for accreditations such as NAAC, NBA, ACBSP, AACSB, AQSA and QAA, and compliance management to higher education institutions.

In September, Pune-based Pharmarack Technologies Pvt. Ltd, which provides SaaS applications for automated order processing and inventory management to pharmaceutical retailers and distributors, had raised Rs 5 crore ($745,000) in its pre-Series A round of funding.