Bharosepe Technology Services Pvt. Ltd, which operates educational payments startup Jodo, has raised $15 million (around Rs 118.5 crore) led by Tiger Global, the company announced on Tuesday.
The round also saw participation from existing investors, Elevation Capital and Matrix Partners India, from whom Jodo has previously raised $4 million.
The funds will be used to accelerate product innovation and sales, and further grow the Jodo team. Currently, the company has over 150 employees.
Jodo was founded in 2020 by Atulya Bhat, Raghav Nagarajan and Koustav Dey, Jodo’s offerings are a suite of specialised payment and lending products to make fee payments convenient and affordable for parents of students while making fee collection hassle-free for educational institutes. Jodo currently works with over 700 educational institutes.
The founders met while working at Matric India Partners, Bhat is an alumnus of IIT Madras and IIM Ahmedabad. Raghav founded lending startup Rupeevest after graduating from IIT Kharagpur. Dey has worked with companies such as Morgan Stanley, and McKinsey, and is an IIT Kanpur alumnus, according to their respective LinkedIn profiles.
The company said it is currently focused on catering to the private education sector which they claim has over $100 billion in annual spending.
Mridul Arora, Partner, Elevation Capital said “The enthusiasm with which their products have been adopted by schools and parents alike proves that not only are they solving a deep pain point, but that they are doing so through tech-first solutions that are intuitive to use.”
VC firms have started signing smaller cheques for early-stage startups in recent times. Tiger Global made its first seed investment in India in May, betting on software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform Shopflo, at a pre-product stage. Tiger lately has shifted its focus to Series A and smaller rounds.
In June, Tiger invested in business-to-business (B2B) manufacturing and automation startup Groyyo. Followed by investment in a battery-swapping network for electric vehicles, Battery Smart.
