Questo Wellbeing Pvt Ltd, which runs Stoa School, an online business school, said it has secured $1.5 million (around Rs 11 crore) from founders of Zerodha, CRED, Udemy, Myntra, Redbus, and Zivame.
The round saw participation from Nithin Kamath, co-founder, Zerodha; Kunal Shah, founder, CRED; Gagan Biyani, co-founder, Udemy; Richa Kar, co-founder, Zivame; Raveen Sastry, co-founder, Myntra.
Others include Phanindra Sama, co-founder, RedBus, and Vaibhav Domkundwar, founder, Better Capital.
The company said the initial investment will help the online B-school scale up its capacity to serve more learners, introduce new programmes as well as build tech for running its online-first campus.
Through its flagship six-month part-time StoaMBA programme, the firm aims to help professionals join and grow in business management roles at a fraction of the cost and time of a traditional MBA.
Stoa School’s proprietary weekend business case hackathon format helps professionals develop relevant skills across industry sectors and business functions while the online learning community helps learners build their professional networks.
Founded by Aditya Kulkarni, Raj Kunkolienkar, Manoj Kambadur and Sharmad Kuvelkar, Stoa School has served over 300 students and has 100+ startups as hiring partners.
“Learning communities has quickly evolved as the format for upskilling and Stoa has been at the forefront of this in India and I've been fortunate to have seen it all come together from just an idea over the last 18 months,” Vaibhav Domkundwar, founder of Better Capital, said.
“Stoa is a true alternative MBA for Indian professionals who are looking to add what I call the "business brain" to their experience and become a "full-stack business gal/guy" which is a massive need across large organisations as well as fast-growing start-ups,” he added.
