Pune-based edtech startup,
ExtraaEdge has raised an undisclosed amount in angel funding from a group of investors including Ritesh Dwivedy, CEO of Petoo.in and Priti Padhy, global director of business intelligence and information management at Microsoft.
Dwivedy is former CEO of JustEat.in which was acquired by FoodPanda in 2015. Other investors who participated in this round include Ash Damle, CEO of Lumiata, a US-based predictive analytics company; Anup Pani, principal engineer at NetSuite Inc; Abhishek Bhatewara, entrepreneur and member of Mumbai Angels; Sahil Sharma, director of ATAP supply chain at Google; and Shezaad J Dastoor, political and conflict analyst at United Nations.
The money will be primarily utilised to expand the business to educational institutes & course sellers in Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Hyderabad & Bangalore. It will also be utilised to augment the tech engineering & customer success team as these two functions are the core of Product & Customers at ExtraaEdge. There are also few international pilots to be done as a part of its global product roadmap especially in UK, Canada, New Zealand & Australia.
ExtraaEdge is a cloud based "Sales & Marketing Automation software" for "educational institutes & course sellers", helping them take smart data-driven enrolment decisions.
"We are a vertical SaaS company and think of us as "Salesforce + HubSpot for educational enterprises & course sellers,” the startup said.
ExtraaEdge operates under the registered name of ExtraaEdge Technology Solutions Pvt. Ltd. The company was started in April 2014 & its Sales Management & Marketing Automation product - “PotentialEDGE” was launched in June 2014.
Student acquisition for educational institutes is highly expensive, inefficient, conventional and presents a $22.6 billion global opportunity.
According to Co-Founder Abhishek Ballabh, "Briefly, ExtraaEdge is a "Student Acquisition Software" for educational institute in a very cost-effective & data-driven way. Understanding prospect students online & social behaviour is the key to selling courses in future and our patent pending platform exactly does that. We are disrupting the conventional marketing mentality on how institutes think about their Sales Management & Digital Marketing efforts & spent.
Our business model is based on yearly license & per lead for educational institutes.
We charge on two parameters - SaaS yearly counsellor license & per lead qualified & generated. This makes the b-model performance based & highly scalable."
According to Co-Founder Sushil Mundada, "We have had an excellent traction with 29 paid enterprise customers after 23 months of our product launch. We are growing at very rapid pace acquiring customers across verticals in education industry with a growth rate of 10% month-on-month. The Churn Rate for us is less than 5% annually."
About Founders
Abhishek Ballabh, Co-FounderAt ExtraaEdge, Abhishek handles Enterprise Sales & Biz Dev, Funding, Product Roadmap, Hiring & owns the Software Architecture of the product. Prior to ExtraaEdge, Abhishek was an early employee & Product Manager at MindTickle Inc. an award winning and fast growing Accel & NEA funded startup. Abhishek has proven track record, international business exposure & in-depth product management experience in enterprise product development and software architecture previously at MindTickle & HSBC Global Technology..
Sushil Mundada, Co-Founder At ExtraaEdge, Sushil handles Product Management, Operations & Engineering. Prior to ExtraaEdge, he has rich industry experience of more than 10 years with HSBC-GLT, Pune. His corporate expertise includes business intelligence and analysis in internet banking channels and CRM.
Sushil is graduate in E&TC Engineering from Pune Institute of Computer Technology and holds PGDBM from University of Pune.
Startups like LeadSquared, Univariety, ePravesh, and Infinite1 are also offering similar services.
"ExtraaEdge's data-driven student discovery platform catapults the education industry by combining the social graph with data science," said Ash Damle, Founder and CEO of Lumiata. "Their analytics-based platform enables institutions to build tailored outreach and offerings based on student behaviour and interest - an approach that helps address the urgent need for greater access to quality personalized education, and at the same time, develop market-ready, highly skilled graduates. I'm excited about ExtraaEdge's potential to disrupt the education industry by being a market-maker for qualified students, not just in India, but around the world."
