Pristine Careers, a financial training firm for certifications like CFA, has raised an undisclosed sum from early-stage venture capital investor Accel Partners in its series A round. Neev Knowledge Management, which runs Pristine Careers, has been founded by former investment bankers and private equity professionals in 2007.
Pristine had earlier raised funds from Dr Joseph Mark Mobius, executive chairman of Templeton Emerging Marketing Group, and Rajesh Sehgal, senior executive director with the Emerging Markets Group of Franklin Templeton.
The funding will be used for for developing IT systems, content development and marketing. Gagan Kumar, Partner at Accel has joined the board of Pristine.
Accel’s earlier investment in the education space includes Rs 5 crore, along with NR Narayana Murthy’s Catamaran Ventures, in Bangalore-based Ace Creative Learning Pvt Ltd, which provides training to K-12 students.
Pristine Careers has trained over 5,000 students in the past four years. It provides coaching to candidates appearing for courses which are certified by CFA Institute (USA), FRM GARP (USA) and PRM PRMIAUK. Besides, it also conducts corporate training for companies like JP Morgan Chase, E&Y, ING Vyasa, HSBC, BOA Continuum, IDBI, STCI and Accenture, and educational institutes like IIT-Mumbai, BITS-Pilani and IIM-Kolkata, among others.
Pristine currently has centres in locations such as Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai and Singapore. It also provides online training.
The company’s co-founders include Atul Kumar (ex-Reliance Capital private equity), Paramdeep Singh (ex-Standard Chartered Capital Markets and Accenture), Pawan Prabhat (ex-CRISIL and Standard Chartered Capital Markets) and Sarita Chand (ex-Goldman Sachs and Aditya Birla Group).
