Former Facebook Director Anand Chandrasekaran Backs Ed-tech Startup EduRev
Former Facebook Director and Snapdeal Senior Executive Anand Chandrasekaran has made his sixth investment for the current calendar year. He has made an undisclosed amount of investment in the Chandigarh based startup, EduRev.
Founded by Kunaal Satija and Hardik Dhamija, Punjab University alumni in 2018, EduRev is an online marketplace for educational courses hosted and sold by teachers. It primarily caters to students of the 12-24 age group, helping them prepare for a number of examinations including school boards, competitive exams such as IIT-Joint Entrance Exam, medical entrance and the Union Public Service Commission, among others. The app provides access to students over videos, notes and tests from teachers. The app works on customisation technology by understanding specific weaknesses and strengths of students and guides them accordingly.
EduRev shows how an online exchange platform for educational content can compete with a well-established platform like BYJU's. Covering more than 1,000 courses, the app includes school curriculums and syllabi for all major competitive exams.
Over 200 educators including teachers, publishers (of textbooks), and coaching institutes, had partnered with EduRev, as of 2019. They offer their courses on EduRev on a revenue-sharing model. Earlier, EduRev had raised seed funding from Singapore-based Jaarvis Ventures and Delhi-based Neebhaw ventures.
The edtech startup, which was part of Y Combinator's winter 2020 batch, has raised $150,000 in funding led by the Silicon Valley-based startup accelerator, according to Crunchbase. Anand's investment is part of the same round, which is still ongoing.
In 2020, apart from EduRev, Chandrasekaran, who is currently the executive vice president of Product Management and Design at Nasdaq-listed cloud contact centre software provider Five9, has also invested in mental wellness startup Mindhouse, which has been founded by Zomato co-founder Pankaj Chaddah, and InVideo, a DIY video creation platform, which was also part of the second cohort of Sequoia Capital’s rapid accelerator programme, Surge.
As per the media report, till date, Anand, who is also the current executive vice president of Product Management and Design at Nasdaq-listed cloud contact centre software provider Five9, has also invested in mental wellness startup Mindhouse, which has been founded by Zomato co-founder, Pankaj Chaddah. He has also backed an estimated 55 ventures, investing between $25,000 to $50,000 in each company and is among the most active investors in the Indian startup ecosystem.
About eight of his seed-stage bets, which includes, online realty platform NoBroker, online credit ledger company Khatabook, online pharmacy Netmeds and customer analytics and cross-channel engagement platform MoEngage, are each currently valued at over $100 million.
The product tech executive has also recorded five exits till date, which have come about from the acquisition of offline-to-online fashion e-commerce venture Fynd by Reliance, and the acquisition of co-working company Innov8 by SoftBank-backed hospitality chain Oyo both of which transactions were announced in 2019.
Three other exits came through the sale of hyper-local drugs delivery app Pluss to Netmeds in 2016, Kavin Mittal led Hike Messenger’s dual acquisitions of social networking app InstaLively and hardware startup Creo, both of which were reported in 2017.
