FrontRow raises $14 million in funding from Eight Roads Ventures, others

FrontRow, a learning platform for non-academic skills, raised $14 million led by Eight Roads Ventures and GSV, with participation from existing investors Lightspeed and Elevation Capital. The round also saw participation from angels such as Vishal Dhadlani, Raftaar, Kunal Shah, Gaurav Munjal, Farid Ahsan and multiple leaders across the startup and entertainment world.

FrontRow offers a learning experience, with flagship courses taught by industry stalwarts such as Amit Trivedi, Neha Kakkar, DIVINE, Suresh Raina and 100+ live courses taught by influencers and experts for learners to go deeper in their field.

A big differentiator for the company according to Mikhil Raj, co-founder, FrontRow) is their community and cohort based approach, “Almost 70% of learning is outside the classroom and that’s the part that hasn’t been solved yet. We enable people to learn from the best, and the small cohorts and community create a learning experience miles ahead of anything out there. In fact we see over 100K+ users learn through our communities every month!” 

FrontRow, founded by Shubhadit Sharma, Mikhil Raj and Ishaan Preet Singh, nine months ago and has scaled to 50,000 paid learners across over 2000 cities worldwide, with users spending over a million hours learning on FrontRow. They had earlier raised a $3.2 million seed round led by Lightspeed, Elevation and Deepika Padukone’s Family Office.

The company plans to use the funds to scale to over 10 categories and 300 courses over the next year. Ishaan Singh, co-founder, FrontRow said they’ll be investing heavily on team and product, “The next decade will see new paradigms of learning, built online first, and better than offline! For this, we're building a new model of community and cohort led learning that is a fundamental evolution of edtech.”

Aditya Systla, Partner, Eight Roads Ventures said: “As investors we’ve been a big champion of the role technology will play in disrupting multiple sectors, including education. We believe the market is highly under-served with strong secular trends in digital adoption of non-academic learning driven by limited availability of qualified instructors, flexibility in scheduling and lack of access to structured curriculum. Ishaan, Mikhil  Shubhadit and the team at FrontRow have taken the ‘pursuit of passion’ digital, at a time when few others have in India. We are very excited to back one of the market leading companies focused on non-academic learning.”