XPrep raises funds from Rising Stars; to focus on more product offerings

Delhi based tutor enablement platform, XPrep on Thursday announced raising of an undisclosed amount of funding from Netherland based venture fund Rising Stars.

The round also saw participation from seasoned entrepreneurs and investors Manish Amin, Pallav Pandey (Co-founder Knowlarity, Broex), Chavi Jafa (Head-Business Solutions, S. Asia, Visa) and a clutch of other angels.

A brainchild of IIT Roorkee alumnus Mukul Rustagi and NSIT alumnus Bhaswat Agarwal, XPrep fills the gap between the tutor-parent community by ensuring a continual and seamless engagement within the ecosystem.

XPrep, a mobile-first platform, is used by tuition centers and coaching institutes to conduct all their pre and post-classroom engagement activities with the kids and their parents on a continuous basis.

XPrep further makes tutors' lives easier by making daily tasks like information dissemination, assessment conductance and class notifications automatic on the app. This allows tutors to cut time on ancillary activities and boost their classroom teaching time in exchange. Tutors also leverage the platform to personalise learning curves of kids within a batch using advanced reporting and analytics.

The company was started in late 2015 and experimented with a couple of models to find a solid product-market fit and launched the current product in Nov'16. Since then, it has amassed 200+ institutes across Delhi-NCR encompassing over 15,000 students within them as its paid customers. It is also a part of Facebook's prestigious FBStart programme.

"We are pleased to see what was an idea on paper, come to first steps of fruition. What is more encouraging is that the team continues to innovate their business model to adapt better to both market and shareholder value creation," said MD Rising Stars, Simanta Das.

"Over the past centuries, instead of making the lives of tutors drastically easier and and boost their profession, technology has tried to replace them. We believe that to be a very unlikely proposition in a country like India, where the education system is competitive and tutors are revered. Empowering tutors has to be the way forward. Paying customers and backing from seasoned investors give us more confidence to march ahead fearlessly towards our vision," said CEO XPrep, Mukul Rustagi.

The company will be using the capital to strengthen technology, expand product offerings and fill up key positions in the team. The firm is also in advanced talks for a follow-on round of capital and is looking forward to closing it soon.

XPrep believes that empowering educators is the way forward in the education industry and the impact of solving this problem would redefine the world's biggest parallel system of education and evolve into a more transparent and efficient one for millions of students and parents across the country. Empowered tutors, smarter kids, happier parents is the motto the team abides by.