CollegeDunia, an education search engine which provides information for higher education in India as well as abroad, has raised a new pre-Series A round of funding worth Rs. 3 crore from existing investor Umang Kumar, co-founder and CEO of Gaadi.com.
Earlier, the company had raised Rs. 1 crore in an angel round last year from Umang Kumar, along with few other angel investors whose names were not disclosed. Following this pre-Series A funding round, the company is looking to raise around $5 million in a Series A round.
Started in 2014, CollegeDunia focuses on providing data and information on about 20,000 colleges. It covers areas like fee, placement, alumni record, rankings, awards and extra-curricular activities. And while there are a lot of portals doing that, CollegeDunia’s overall user experience, and the design philosophy in particular, impressed me — much more than others in this arena.
The startup claims to get over 30,000 unique visitors a day. CollegeDunia further states that they would like to scale that up to 70,000 in the coming months before raising further round of investments. However data from SimilarWeb shows close to 200K monthly pageviews a month. So we are still doubtful about the stats the company claims to have.
The website counts several education groups like NIIT Group, Educomp Business Schools, NMIMS, Alliance Business School and IDP Golbal as its clients.It has about 75 employees, a majority of whom are into content generation and data research department.
In recent times, this particular field of providing students and aspiring graduates of relevant data has seen many private equity and venture capital funds investing into it. Ronnie Screwvala for example, recently launched an online education venture named U Education and invested about $16 million in it.
However, even though these ventures continue to raise investments, scepticism on the authenciticty of data being provided arises when these companies scale up from listing a few 100 colleges/schools to the entire geographical area. It’ll be interesting to see how CollegeDunia fares in that respec.
Last year, iNurture Education, raised Rs 30 crore from Bertelsmann India Investments. Also, CollegeDekho, a startup working on the lines of CollegeDunia, nabbed $1 million in funding from Girnarsoft, parent company of CarDekho.com.
