ExtraaEdge Technology Solutions Pvt. Ltd, an edu-tech startup that helps educational institutions acquire students and increase admissions, has raised an undisclosed amount in angel funding from a group of investors including Ritesh Dwivedy, CEO of Petoo.in and Priti Padhy, global director of business intelligence and information management at Microsoft, a top company executive told VCCircle.
Dwivedy is former CEO of JustEat.in which was acquired by FoodPanda last year.
Other investors who participated in the funding round include Ash Damle, CEO of Lumiata, a US-based predictive analytics company; Anup Pani, principal engineer at NetSuite Inc; Abhishek Bhatewara, entrepreneur and member of Mumbai Angels; Sahil Sharma, director of ATAP supply chain at Google; and Shezaad J Dastoor, political and conflict analyst at United Nations.
The Pune-based startup plans to use the funds to expand the business to educational institutes and course sellers in Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bangalore in addition to strengthening its tech and customer acquisition teams, said Abhishek Ballabh, co-founder of ExtraaEdge.
The startup is also planning to spend a significant amount on its planned pilot programmes in Canada, New Zealand and Australia.
ExtraaEdge is a cloud-based sales and marketing automation software enabling educational institutes and course sellers take smart data-driven enrolment decisions.
It helps educational institutes reach out to and engage with prospective students and showcase their unique value proposition.
“Student acquisition for educational institutes is highly expensive and inefficient and presents a $22.6 billion global opportunity. Understanding prospective students’ online and social behaviour is the key to selling courses in future and our patent pending platform exactly does that,†Ballabh said.
ExtraaEdge was founded by Ballabh and Sushil Mundada in April 2014. Its sales management marketing automation product PotentialEDGE was launched in June 2014. Ballabh worked with MindTickle Inc and HSBC while Mundada was associated with HSBC for over 10 years before launching ExtraaEdge.
"ExtraaEdge's analytics-based platform enables institutions to build tailored outreach and offerings based on student behaviour and interest - an approach that helps address the urgent need for greater access to quality personalized education, and at the same time, develop market-ready, highly skilled graduates," Damle said.
The product is offered on yearly licence and per lead basis for educational institutes. The startup claims to have 29 paid enterprise customers with 10% month-on-month growth rate.
“Cloud-based products are the future and they have built the product with the right technical strategy. Their business model is based on recurring revenue which means as long as the company continues to provide new features and upgrades to their customers, they would get high renewal and lower churn which could bring in a lot of future revenue," Pani, one of the investors, said.
LeadSquared, Univariety, ePravesh, and Infinite1 are among other startups that offer similar services.
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