AdmitKard raises Rs 10 cr in pre-series A round from startup founders

AdmitKard, an ed-tech platform that simplifies accessing higher education abroad raised Rs 10 crore in pre-Series A round. The round witnessed participation from the founders of renowned ed-tech start-up-like -Vamsi Krishna & Pulkit Jain of Vedantu, Mayank Kumar of upGrad, Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini & Sumit Jain of Unacademy, Tanushree Nagori, Aditya Shankar & Ravi Sekhar of DoubtNut, Akshay Saxena of Avanti, and other prominent investors including Pankaj Chaddah (ex-Zomato), Suhail Sameer & Dhruv Dhanraj Bahl of BharatPe,Vijay Arisetty (MyGate), Anand Chandrasekaran (ex-Snapdeal, Facebook), Sameer Guglani of Morpheus Gang, BCG Partners, MD of JPMorgan and others.

The pandemic certainly wreaked havoc on the start-up industry, however, ed-tech has been one of the sectors to witness growth in traction.  

“During the pandemic, we realised that students were not able to travel abroad due to the closed international borders. Hence we doubled down our effort on ensuring the students’ experience in our long drawn funnel gets better. To enable that we realized the guidance to the students’ needs to be product-driven instead of being dependent on humans. We sought guidance from our mentors from other ed-tech companies and de-skilled the entire counselling process, solving a major problem of counsellors in this industry,” said Rachit Agrawal – co-founder, AdmitKard.

Including the current round, the startup has raised a total of Rs 17 crore. It has created a strong community of international students and students looking to study abroad. They have already served students from 26 states in India through their platform and have also served few students from other countries like Sri Lanka, Nepal, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Vietnam. The company is scaling at a fast pace, having counselled over 25,000 students, processing around 12,000 applications, and boasting a strong portfolio of over 2,300 universities across the globe.

“I have been a mentor to Rachit & Piyush for a long time now and have seen the journey of AdmitKard. Their focus on productizing student guidance and de-skilling the role of a counselor is a big win as it solves a very fundamental problem of talent quality and standardization at scale. I am happy to be a part of their growth journey” said Vamsi Krishna – co-founder, Vedantu.

According to the founders, AdmitKard has witnessed a 1100 per cent hike in the number of queries pouring in. The company has touched an annual revenue runrate of $2 million in the month of June 2021, and is on track to hit ARR of $8 million by March 2022. "We have seen spectacular growth and kudos to our automation, we were able to handle them well. Now the focus is on growth and hence we would be raising a bigger round. This is more like a mentors and well-wishers round. We are fortunate to have credible names from ed-tech sector itself and other marquee angels backing us today,”  said Piyush Bhartiya- founder & CEO, AdmitKard.

“AdmitKard has chosen the right category that has been waiting to be disrupted and addressing it with great service, unlocking desired value for students. The team is well placed to disrupt the space which is unorganized and dominated by offline players with a great PMF and strong plans to scale and hence have decided to back it” said Ravi Shekhar KV, co-founder, DoubtNut

“As someone who has studied abroad extensively and understands the challenges one faces from discovering the right programme to arriving on campus, I am excited about what AdmitKard is building. Their product-first approach to democratising access to global education is what our youth need today” said Dhruv Dhanraj Bahl – COO, BharatPe.