Exclusive: Career coaching platform Board Infinity raises angel round

Career coaching platform Board Infinity has raised Rs 2.2 crore from a clutch of angel investors, top executives of the company told TechCricle. 

The Mumbai-based company coaches students from management and engineering streams for placements.

The funding round saw participation by Ambarish Raghuvanshi, former CFO of InfoEdge, Sridhar Rallabandi, former president of Axis Bank, Maheshwar Peri, founder of Careers360, Manish Gupta, founder of Gurugram-based accelerator UIncept, Nirmal Singh, managing director of Atraxn LLP, Vishal and Ritu Soni, cofounders of fitness app Obino and Angel Network Middle East. Other high networth individuals including executives from Expedia, Microsoft, Flipkart and Tata Group also participated in the round.

Founded in 2017 by SP Jain Institute of Management & Research alumni Sumesh Nair and Abhay Gupta, Board Infinity enrolls industry experts as coaches for offering courses in data analytics, full stack development, digital marketing and other streams. It also partners with corporates and educational institutions to solve the skilling gap. It works on a revenue-share model with students who pay a part of their salary after being placed apart from an upfront base fee.

“We have disrupted learning engagement with more than 90% customers competing our courses compared to typical average of 10% in self-paced video courses, Nair said. “Our platform has scaled to more than 700 experts in the last two years impacting over 1 lakh learners and job-seekers. Corporates find immense value in on-boarding talent from Board Infinity.” 

He added that the current round of funding will be used for product development and expanding the learner base in tier-2 and tier-3 cities. Board Infinity is also planning to introduce commerce and liberal arts streams in the coming year.

Other deals in the segment

The skilling space has seen a surge of investments in recent times.

• July 2019: Skilling platform for graduates and professionals, Caymus Technology Ventures, raised Rs 1.2 crore from a group of investors including Rob Solomon of social fundraising platform GoFundMe.
• July 2019: Professional education company upGrad acquired CohortPlus, an online community for product managers and data science enthusiasts.
• June 2019: Skill tracking platform for professionals, Degreed, raised Rs 245 crore from Owl Ventures, Jump Capital, GSV Accelerate and others.