Education-technology startup Pesto Tech, which had raised funding from venture capital firm Matrix Partners last year, has raised fresh money from a clutch of individual investors.
Pesto also recently roped in Swiggy co-founder Rahul Jaimini as its co-founder and chief operating officer, said the startup in a statement. Jamini had previously made an angel investment in the company.
The new investors in the latest funding round include former Snapdeal executive Anand Chandrasekaran, it added without disclosing the financial details
Others who pooled in capital are Silicon Valley-based angel investors. They include Ryan Hoover, founder, Product Hunt; Ankur Nagpal, founder and CEO, Teachable; Sahil Lavingia, founder and CEO, Gumroad; Hiten Shah, co-founder and CEO, FYI.
Others are Andreas Klinger, investor, Remote First Capital; Maran Nelson founder, Interact; Derek Anderson, co-founder of Bevy and Startup Grind; and Cindy Bi, general partner, CapitalX.
Pesto will use the funds to strengthen its presence in the Silicon Valley.
Pesto was founded by Ayush Jaiswal and Andrew Linfoot in March 2017. The startup's training programme helps software engineers break into international-technology careers via full-time remote jobs.
Jaiswal, who is also CEO, said that the goal of the startup is to make it extremely easy for companies to think about talent acquisition globally from day zero.
This will help build a level playing ground for talent to compete for such opportunities, irrespective of where they’re geographically.
Product Hunt's Hoover said that the future of knowledge work is remote and Pesto is accelerating this transition, connecting strong developers in India with the world’s best startups.
Matrix Partners had led a fresh funding round for an undisclosed sum in Pesto in May last year.
At that time, Jamini, Nandan Reddy, another founder of Swiggy; Ritesh Malik, founder of co-working space provider Innov8; and Ashish Tulsian, founder of restaurant software management firm POSist; had also brought in capital.
Indian edtech startups have attracted significant investor money during the pandemic as schools and colleges remain shut and classes are happening online.
Just last month, US-based private equity firm Silver Lake led a new round of funding in India's most heavily funded edtech startup Byju’s. The fundraise came less than two weeks after Byju’s secured $122 million in funding from DST Global.
Earlier this year, Byju’s had also raised an undisclosed sum from Bond Capital, a venture capital firm co-founded by former Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker.
Last month, Unacademy also raised a whopping $150 million in a new funding round led by SoftBank, catapulting the ed-tech company to the famed unicorn club of startups with a valuation of over $1 billion. It is the only other unicorn in the space other than Byju's.
Other edtech startups such as Vedantu, Eruditus and Toppr also received cheques from investors in the past few months.