Infosys co-founder Kris invests in education startup

Software major co-founder S. Gopalakrishnan (Kris) and Hexaware-and-Aptech founder Atul Nishar have invested an unspecified amount in Avagmah, an education technology startup focused on higher education

"The fresh investment will be used on technology enhancement in getting new Indian university clients," Avagmah said in a statement here on Wednesday.

The two-year-old city-based start-up works with Pondicherry University, Bharathidasan University and Loss-Angles-based UCLA Extension.

Though the startup had raised $5 million (over Rs. 33.6 crore) from institutional and individual investors during the past 18 months, it claimed growing eight times and becoming operationally profitable.

Among its investors are Singapore-based Lionrock Capital, serial entrepreneur Ganesh Krishnan and Mumbai-based investment firm Zodius Capital founder Neeraj Bhargava.

Krishnan, a former chief executive of TutorVista also invested in start-ups like Portea Medical, BigBasket and BlueStone, among others.

"As the higher education system is facing challenge of access and excellence, with only 24 million students enrolled out of the potential 120 million, universities and institutions have to adopt technology to skill millions of professionals and students and bridge the demand-supply gap," Gopalakrishnan said on the occasion.

Founded by NIT Kurukshetra alumni turned entrepreneur K.S. Karthik, Avagmah provides an intuitive technology platform on a managed services model to assist universities with digital marketing technology, application-based and web technology solutions for delivery of courses by universities.

"I see great potential in Avagmah, which can bring in positive disruption in our education system through technology," Gopalakrishnan asserted.

Avagmah also offers web and mobile application platforms, helping universities manage the lifecycle of their students, including marketing, admissions and other administration processes.

"With universities facing shortage of quality faculty, Avagmah technology will enable them to increase their reach and access to students," Nishar pointed out.

The tech-ed company leadership team includes Myntra co-founder Sankar Bora and former Microsoft and Informatica geek in the US Prasad Palla.

"We are focussed on scaling our growth by 10-fold in the next two years with our robust collaborative technology, which helped one of the university clients reporting 200 percent growth in student enrolment in 12 months," Karthik recalled.

As an amalgamation of cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) technology and managed services solutions, Avagmah platform enables universities increase reach through services in marketing, counselling and virtual classroom.