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Noida-based edtech platform that simplifies accessing higher education abroad AdmitKard on Tuesday said it has raised Rs 10 crore in pre-Series A funding. To date, the startup has raised a total of Rs 17 crore.

The round is majorly backed by founders of edtech platforms who participated in their personal capacity, including Vamsi Krishna and Pulkit Jain (Vedantu), Mayank Kumar (upGrad), Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini, and Sumit Jain (Unacademy), Tanushree Nagori, Aditya Shankar, and Ravi Sekhar (DoubtNut), Akshay Saxena (Avanti).

Other prominent investors, including Pankaj Chaddah (ex-Zomato), Suhail Sameer and Dhruv Dhanraj Bahl (BharatPe), Vijay Arisetty (MyGate), Anand Chandrasekaran (ex-Snapdeal, Facebook), Sameer Guglani (Morpheus Gang), BCG Partners, MD of JPMorgan, and others.

Speaking on the development, Rachit Agrawal, Co-founder, AdmitKard, said,

“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 realised the guidance to the students’ needs to be product-driven instead of being dependent on humans. We sought guidance from our mentors from other edtech companies and de-skilled the entire counselling process, solving a major problem of counsellors in this industry.”

Launched in 2017 by IIT-IIM Alumni Piyush Bhartiya and Rachit Agrawal, AdmitKard claims to have served students from 26 states in India through its platform and has also served few students from other countries, including Sri Lanka, Nepal, Afghanistan, Nigeria, and Vietnam.

The startup is scaling at a fast pace, having counselled over 25,000 students, processing around 12,000 applications, and boasting a portfolio of over 2,300 universities across the globe.

“We witnessed a 1,100 percent hike in the number of queries pouring in… 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 the edtech sector and other marquee angels backing us today,” said AdmitKard CEO Piyush Bhartiya.

He added that AdmitKard touched an ARR of $2 million in June 2021, and is on track to hit an ARR of $8 million by March 2022.

According to Vedantu Co-founder Vamsi Krishna, AdmitKard’s focus on productising student guidance and de-skilling the role of a counsellor is a big win as it solves a very fundamental problem of talent quality and standardisation at scale.

“The team is well placed to disrupt the space, which is unorganised and dominated by offline players with a great PMF and strong plans to scale, and hence, I have decided to back it,” said Ravi Shekhar KV, Co-founder, DoubtNut.