For the past year or so, education has been the primary focus of technology startups and investors alike. Most of the startups in this space have recently been in news for their fund raising and now, another startup has joined their ranks. Fastudent, an e-commerce platform for education-related stuffs, has today announced that it has closed its pre-Series A round of funding.
The company has kept the financial details related to this funding round undisclosed. However, the names of the investors have been disclosed. The investors include Kanwaljit Singh (founder, Fireside Ventures), Ajay Lakhotia (former director, Vertex Ventures), Pavan Ongole (former director, Softbank) and Ashish Gupta (Trustee, Ashoka University).
Commenting on the funding, Kanwaljit Singh said,
Fastudent has tapped into a consumer need for School-endorsed education supplies – coupled with the convenience of e-commerce deliveries. The young & dynamic team intends to service the education fraternity like never before by creating a highly personalized brand experience for its audience.
Fastudent was started by Gaurav Barman and Geetanjali Khanna in 2013. It offers quality international education products to students in India. The platform aggregates educational products that can help the education fraternity involving students, parents, schools and teachers from play group to post graduation to fulfill their academic needs.
The company has claimed that currently they have 200 institutes in the NCR region as its clients. Furthermore, it is hoping to add another 1,000 institutes in the near future.
Commenting on its expansion plans, Geetanjali Khanna, co-founder, Fastudent, said,
Our model has been successfully accepted by NCR schools. We will be expanding to private schools in other markets like Bangalore, Pune and Mumbai by 2017.
Many Asian countries including Japan, Singapore and China are also on our road-map after 2018. The successful acceptance of companies like 8dol.com in China, which is a delivery service model for colleges, validates the need for a platform to streamline educational supplies in the education sector beyond India.
Earlier, in November last year, the company had raised an undisclosed amount of funding in its seed round, which was led by Ashish Gupta, founder & trustee of Ashoka University.
While many ed-tech startups have been able to raise significant amount of funding, very few of them have successfully scaled their business. Owning to scaling problem, an ed-tech startup — EduKart recently shut down and its team of around 50 people, has been absorbed by Paytm.
