Netherland Based Venture Fund Rising Stars, Others Back Edtech Startup XPrep

Delhi-based edtech platform XPrep has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Netherland-based venture fund Rising Stars. The round also saw participation from Manish Amin (co-founder & CIO – ‎Yatra Online), Pallav Pandey (co-founder Knowlarity, Broex), Chavi Jafa (Head-Business Solutions, S. Asia, Visa) and a clutch of other angels.

The startup will use company will use the newly raised capital to strengthen technology, expand product offerings and fill up key positions in the team.

Founded in 2015, XPrep is the brainchild of IIT Roorkee alumnus Mukul Rustagi and NSIT alumnus Bhaswat Agarwal. The startup aims to fill the gap between the tutor-parent community.

Talking about the investment, Simanta Das, Managing Director- Rising Stars said, “We are pleased to see what was an idea on paper, come to first steps of fruition. What is more encouraging is that the team continues to innovate their business model to adapt better to both market and shareholder value creation.”

XPrep is a mobile-first platform. It is used by tuition centres and coaching institutes to conduct pre and post-classroom engagement activities, with the kids and their parents on a continuous basis.

XPrep helps tutors by making automatic notifications on the app about daily tasks like information dissemination, assessment conductance, etc. It also helps tutors to leverage the platform to personalise learning curves of students in a batch by using advanced reporting and analytics.

The company was started in late 2015 and experimented with a couple of models to find a solid product-market fit and launched the current product in Nov’16.  Since its official launch in November 2016, the company has amassed 200+ institutes across Delhi-NCR encompassing over 15,000 students within them as paid customers. The company is also a part of Facebook’s FBStart programme.

As per Build to Scale: Edtech Report 2017 by Unitus Seed Fund, the most preferred sub-sector is K12 – as 37% businesses are operating in this space and there is a whopping 92% investor funding interest. Online education in India will see approximately 8x growth in the next five years, as per a report by Google and KPMG. This will have a significant impact on the edtech market that has a potential to touch $1.96 Bn by 2021 from where it stands now i.e. $247 Mn.

As per Inc42 Datalabs Report for H1 2017, edtech took the fourth spot with 23 deals in the sector. Just yesterday, edtech startup Unacademy raised $11.5 Mn in its Series B round of funding led by Sequoia India and SAIF Partners. Existing investors and angels including Nexus Venture Partners and Blume Ventures also participated in the round. With this round of funding from Rising Stars and other angel investors edtech startup XPrep will look to accelerate its growth.

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