Elearning Startup Vlurn Raises Seed Funding

Mumbai-based elearning startup, Vlurn, has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Vidyadhar Sarfare, MD & CEO of Accord Group.

Founded in 2014, by Mithil Pawar and Ashutosh Prajapati, Vlurn, is an integrated elearning platform. It partners with best trainers and coaching institutes in the country to offer a wide range of online courses. These courses are offered across a variety of learning categories such as finance, IT, arts & music, languages, math & science, entrance exams and free courses.

Mithil Pawar, co-founder of Vlurn said, “The portal is not a marketplace for buying and selling of courses, but it is an integrated platform where learners search and choose courses based on their requirements and then undertake them in a collaborative manner with fellow learners.”

Currently, the portal provides around 50 different online courses in six verticals. It has about 2000 registered users who have undertaken more than 5000 hours of training in various courses.

The startup will use the raised capital to expand its technical team for development of its mobile app and for creating studio infrastructure. The funds will also be used for marketing & promotion of the courses.

Vidyadhar Sarafare, MD & CEO of Accord Group, said, “We feel that there are a lot of competitive niches in the overall learning market and we backed Vlurn to focus on offering video based training of some top notch trainers in India. This is a very large target market with multiple streams and online trainings are at an unprecedented inflection point, given the rapid rise in internet penetration and mobile phone usage.”

India’s online education market size is expected to grow to $40 Bn by 2017 from the present $20 Bn. More than half of the country’s 1 Bn population falls in the target market for education and related services, and has the highest growth rate in the world in self-paced elearning.

Currently, the Indian education market is around $100 Bn, out of which, higher education contributes 59.7 % of the market size, school education 38.1 %, pre-school segment 1.6 %, and the remaining 0.6% is contributed by technology & multimedia.

Also, as per the reports by the UK-India Business Council, India is expecting a boost from the government’s budget of INR 1.13 Tn set aside for the Digital India initiative.

In the elearning space, other players who have recently raised funding include, Delhi-based online education company, Meritnation.com, which raised $4 Mn (about INR 25 Cr) from Info Edge (India) Ltd; Mumbai-based technology-led specialised academic services organization, Schoolguru, raised $3 Mn (about INR 20 Cr) in a Series A round led by family offices of few HNI investors in India and the US; Mumbai-based online test prep platform, Toppr, raised $2 Mn from Innoven Capital; and another Mumbai-based startup, Plancess EduSolutions, raised $2 Mn from Aarti Group’s Promoters Gogri Family.

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