Surge-Backed Edtech Seekho Raises $3 Mn To Achieve 7 Mn User Base By 2023

AI-enabled upskilling and career development startup Seekho has raised $3 Mn in a Pre-Series A funding round. 

The round also saw participation from other investors including the family office of the JM Financial Group, LetsVenture, Trica, Super Morpheus, Yuj Ventures, and  Sequoia Capital India’s Surge and angel investors– Varsha Rao and Amit Ranjan. 

According to the edtech startup, fresh capital will be deployed to grow Seekho’s business model. 

Divya Jain, cofounder of Seekho said, “Seekho believes that the higher education system does not prepare you for the world of work. Between graduating and starting work, there is a sizeable gap filled neither by the educational institutions nor the employers. We are using technology to truly democratize job-led education in an affordable, fun and gamified way.”

Founded in April 2021 by Divya Jain, Arihant Jain and Ajeet Kushwaha, Seekho is a community-based platform that offers online upskilling courses as well as job opportunities. 

The startup uses artificial intelligence in the learning and job matching process. In essence, it gamifies the learning process and on achieving every milestone, it offers Karma points to users that can be redeemed on live classes. 

According to the startup, Seekho has recently launched a gamified group discussion forum called GriD and a learning event called SeekhoX. 

The startup claims to have 525K registered users; of this, more than 10K users have been employed through its platform to date. It further asserts to have reached a revenue run rate of $5 Mn and plans to have a user base of 7 Mn by 2023.  

The startup competes with the likes of Unacademy, Coursera, edX, BJYU’S and Udemy. 

In January 2022, Scaler Academy, an upskilling platform of InterviewBit, raised $55 Mn in a Series B funding round at a $710 Mn valuation led by Lightrock India, a new investor, and existing investors Sequoia Capital India and Tiger Global. 

The startup plans to deploy the freshly-infused capital towards pursuing international expansion, launching new product offerings, making strategic acquisitions and onboarding more talent while also growing its customer base in India. 

Founded by Anshuman Singh and Abhimanyu Saxena in 2014, InterviewBit offers online computer science programs for college graduates and young professional software engineers. In 2019, it renamed its InterviewBit Academy course to Scaler Academy.

Days ago, edtech startup CollegeDekho acquired Delhi-NCR based PrepBytes in a cash and equity deal to expand its learning and upskilling vertical CollegeDekho Learn. 

The Gurugram-based startup is expected to witness a 4X revenue growth in 2022 compared to its last year’s numbers.  

Founded in 2015 by Ruchir Arora, Rajiv Singh, Saurabh Jain and Rohit Saha, CollegeDekho caters to around 50% of all college searches in India. It has facilitated more than 300,000 college applications and ensured over 60,000 admissions since its inception.