Sunstone Eduversity Pvt. Ltd has raised Rs 11.3 crore ($1.56 million at current exchange rate) in a seed funding round led by Bengaluru-based Prime Venture Partners and joined by LetsVenture, PS1 Venture and GlobalLogic co-founder Rajul Garg, according to several reports.
The company, based in Gurugram, said it will use the funds to build out its network of colleges across various cities and increase its investments in its technology and curriculum. VCCircle has reached out to Sunstone and will update this story accordingly.
“The biggest positive of our course is we offer ‘pay after placement’, which means students can do the course by just paying an admission fee. Once they get placed after two years, we charge 10 times their monthly salary at which they get placed,” said Sunstone co-founder Piyush Nangru in The Economic Times report.
The startup runs professional education programmes for students in partnership with colleges, offering specialisation in banking and financial services, logistics, digital marketing and others. The programme is run on the partner college’s campus, but admissions, programme design, education content and placements are all done by Sunstone.
Sunstone was founded in 2015 by Ashish Munjal, who also co-founded Crownit, and Nangru, both alumni of the Institute of Management Technology, Ghaziabad. The startup currently has five partner institutions in three cities with 300 students. It is aiming to partner a further 10 institutions and achieve the enrolment of over 2,000 students across nine cities in 2020.
Companies that have recruited its students include Paytm, Flipkart, Swiggy and Axis Bank, said the startup.
Deals in the ed-tech segment
The online learning and ed-tech segment has attracted considerable investor interest of late.
The valuation of ed-tech firm Byju’s crossed $5 billion after it raised $31.3 million in a funding round in March led by existing investors General Atlantic and Tencent Holdings Ltd.
In December last year, Byju’s announced that it had secured $540 million (Rs 3,855 crore then) in a round led by South African tech conglomerate Naspers.
Last month, Info Edge (India) Ltd, which owns and operates portals such as job site Naukri.com, said it had invested Rs 7.06 crore (a little less than $1 million) in Adda247, a test preparation platform for government and public-sector exams.
In August, Vedantu Innovations Pvt. Ltd raised $42 million (Rs 300 crore) in a Series C funding round led by US-based investment firm Tiger Global Management and private equity firm WestBridge Capital. That month, AdmitKard raised $1 million (around Rs 7.15 crore) from a clutch of investors including Australia-based ed-tech fund Growth DNA.
