Education startup Careers360 raises angel funding from Ranjan Pai, Mahesh Murthy and others

Tuesday June 17, 2014 , 3 min Read

Careers360, a brand that was launched to plug the information gaps and help students take informed career decisions has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from five marquee Angel investors. The investors include Eduprenuer and Private equity investor Ranjan Pai who heads the Manipal Education and Medical Group, Satya Narayanan, founder of the Career Launcher group, and Digital Media expert and Venture capitalist Mahesh Murthy of Pinstorm. Two other financial investors have also invested in the funding round but their names remain undisclosed.

The five-year old company now wants to be the biggest education marketplace. The intent behind the marketplace is to be able to help students evaluate, compare and purchase products and services on all parameters - quality, suitability and price. The new platform www.mycareers360.com would be independent of the information portal www.careers360.com.

“Over the last 5 years, we have worked hard to create India's most trusted brand for the students. Our objective is to be credible, complete and comprehensive and help students take informed career decisions. Over the next couple of years, we are aiming to create India's largest Edu market place," said Maheshwer Peri, Founder-Careers360 talking about the investments.

"Students in India have come to respect the unbiased editorial of Careers360 - and this has led to its dominance in the school selection space. I'm happy to help the company and brand grow even faster," said Mahesh Murthy.

Careers360’s has been reaching out to students through multiple platforms viz. print, web, mobile and TV. In fact, this has helped it to create an audience in excess of all other competing platforms. The platform also has a monthly magazine in English and Hindi. The Careers360 website is the largest in its domain with a traffic of more than eight million students (according to May 2014, Google analytics). The latest Comscore data also suggests that the website has higher traffic than the next three competitors added together.

Ranjan Pai said, “What Careers360 has achieved in such a short time despite competition from very big entities is remarkable. Looking at the performance and capabilities of the team at Careers360 and the need for such a market place, I am delighted to be a part of their endeavor."“Careers360 with its reach and scale across multiple platforms is poised to seize the opportunity in Education services marketplace and I am excited to back Mahesh in this endeavor," said Satya Narayanan.

The Indian education market is estimated to be worth INR 5.9 trillion in 2014-15. With nearly half the population of India below the age of 25 and increasing penetration of Internet & mobile devices in this demographic, the growth of online education market in India is indubitable too.

Infrastructure and regulation issues might be slowing down the otherwise accelerating education space in India; online education, especially in the unregulated markets is poised for an immense growth. India’s online education market size is predicted to grow to $40 billion by 2017 from the present $20 billion.