ExtraaEdge Technology Solutions Pvt. Ltd, an ed-tech startup, has raised $700,000 (approximately Rs 5 crore at current exchange rates) in its pre-Series A funding round.
The funding round was led by Bengaluru-based Sprout Venture Partners and the Indian Angel Network, ExtraaEdge said in a statement. Others that participated in the round include TiE Pune Angels, First Cheque LLP and UIncept.
Abhishek Ballabh, co-founder at ExtraaEdge, said the company will use the funds for expanding its customer footprint, strengthening its data science infrastructure and team, and enhance its product.
Separately, Sprout Venture Partners’ Sahil Gupta said the startup’s platform was providing educational institutes with a data-driven tool to manage and automate their leads and sales processes.
There was a growing need for such products, especially in the Middle East and Asia, he added.
Pune-based ExtraaEdge, which was founded by Ballabh and Sushil Mundada in 2015, says it provides enrolment solutions for the education industry through its marketing automation and customer relationship management (CRM) platform.
The company says its platform is a full-stack solution for admission management and marketing automation, including services such as CRM and conversational artificial intelligence-based chatbots.
ExtraaEdge says its services have been adopted by over 130 educational institutes including the MIT Group, Jain University, CMR University, ASM Group, FIITJEE’s myPAT, and Aakash Digital.
In June 2016, the startup 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.
SaaS startups in vogue
The SaaS segment across industries has been buzzing with investor activity in recent months. The rapid progress of frontier technologies such as artificial intelligence and natural language processing resulted in a number of SaaS startups springing up.
In December last year, customer experience-focussed startup Seekify Technologies Pvt. Ltd raised $1.5 million (around Rs 10.6 crore) in seed funding from Sequoia Capital India’s startup scale-up programme, Surge.
In the same month, marketing intelligence startup Slintel Inc. also raised $1.5 million in its seed funding round, which was led by the Bengaluru-based Stellaris Venture Partners.
Tookitaki, a firm that develops artificial intelligence-based sustainable compliance solutions for financial institutions, closed its Series A funding round in November, raising $19.2 million (Rs 137.4 crore) from investors including Viola Fintech and global venture firm SIG Asia Investment.