With $6 Mn Funding Edtech Startup Adda247 Plans To Go Vernacular

Delhi-based edtech startup Adda247 has raised $6 Mn in Series B funding led by Infoedge India Ltd and Asha Impact. Besides these two new investors, STL which is an existing investor of Adda247 also participated in the latest round.

With the recent funding, Adda247 has so far raised a total of $10 Mn. The edtech startup plans to leverage this funding for expanding to new exam categories, adding new vernacular languages on the platform and amplifying its pan-India presence.

Founded in 2010 by Anil Nagar and Saurabh Bansal, Adda247 provides online coaching for government job entrance tests. Its platform offers products such as live video classes, on-demand video courses, mock tests and books to government job seekers. The startup also operates multiple exam-specific online platforms such as bankersadda.com, sscadda.com, teachersadda.co.in and careerpower.in.

In a press statement, Adda247 claimed that it has achieved 10x growth in the last three years in terms of revenue and paid users.

Interestingly, CEO Nagar claimed that in 2018, more than 90% of the selected candidates in banking and staff selection commission’s (SSC) government jobs used one or the other Adda247 services for exam preparation.

The CEO further claimed that Adda247 has more than 40 Mn users with more than 3 Mn daily active users (DAU). “More than 60% of our users come from Tier 3 cities and small towns and that is where we are seeing unprecedented growth and engagement,” he added.

Aditi Gupta who looks after principal investments at Asha Impact said that catering to over 60 Mn aspirants applying for government jobs annually makes Adda247 a good fit for the investor’s mission.

Adda247 has recently completed 10 years of successful operations in India. Currently, Adda247 is present in both online and offline platforms. It claims that with more than 450 coaching centres, over 500 professionals and more than 1000 teachers across the country, the startup is providing quality education to the masses.

Since its inception in 2010, the company in the statement said that it has successfully trained more than 100 Mn students and helped them crack various prestigious government examinations.

Indian Edtech Startups Going Big

A 2017 KPMG study suggests that Indian edtech segment is expected to be a $1.96 Bn market by 2021. Moreover, according to DataLabs by Inc42, there were 3,500 edtech startups in India in 2018. The report further highlighted that between 2014 and the first half of 2019, edtech startups raised $1.27 Bn across 287 deals.

In the online government job preparation space, Adda247 faces direct competition from other online government jobs preparation platforms such as Unacademy, Testbook, and GradeUp, among others.

Earlier this week, Delhi-based Gradeup had raised $7 Mn in a fresh funding round. With the investment coming from its existing backer, Times Internet, Gradeup plans to scale its academic team to 100 faculties and 200 subject matter experts and to expand further in Tier 2,3, and 4 towns.

In June 2019, Unacademy raised $50 Mn in a funding round led by Steadview Capital, Sequoia India, Nexus Venture Partners and Blume Ventures. The company had then shared that the funds were to be used to onboard more educators, fuel growth across multiple exam categories and build a world-class product and team.

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