EduRev to raise up to $1 million in pre-Series-A round

The start-up will launch tabs as an alternative to school and college books in February

Gurgaon-based educational start-up, EduRev, is looking at raising anywhere between $500,000 (Rs 3.35 crore) and $1 million (Rs 6.7 crore) in a pre-Series-A round of funding by early next year, according to its founder and chief executive officer Kunaal Satija.

"We are planning to launch a tab in February with EduRev's technology used in the backend, which will be an alternative to buying school and college books. The pre-Series-A proceeds will be used for accelerating sales, setting affiliate models across the country and promoting the tab in more institutions," he told Business Standard.

Founded in May this year by IT engineer and international tech blogger Satija, EduRev (abbreviation for Education Revolution) is an educational network based on a crowd-sourced library, and is a platform for teachers, authors and publishers to shift from an offline model to the online one.

"While everything from IT to communication has evolved by leaps and bounds, means and methods of education still remain the same. Also, we feel that every student deserves the highest quality of education, irrespective of external parameters but with only a limited number of good teachers. The only way we could see to achieve this was through technology," Satija said.

EduRev's crowd-sourced library has now crossed 70,000 documents and videos coming in from more than 20,000 registered students and 200 students. Satija said EduRev's target for 2016 was to have one million registered users on board with over 200 courses covering the complete Indian education.

Last week, the start-up has secured an undisclosed amount in a seed round of funding from Singapore-based Jaarvis Accelerator, which it plans to use to make a more intuitive product.

"We released a beta app on Android two months ago which has crossed 1,500 downloads. We will be stabilising that before launching an iOS version by the end of January 2016," Satija said.