Leverage Edu, an EdTech platform that helps students with higher education and career guidance in foreign universities, announced that it has raised $22 million (INR 167 Crore) in its Series B round of funding at a valuation of $120 million.
The funding round witnessed participation from various investors like Kaizenvest Private Equity, DSP Mutual Fund Group, Artha Ventures, UAE-based NB Ventures, 9Unicorns; plus returning funds like Blume Ventures, DSG Consumer Partners, and Tomorrow Capital, among others.
Prominent individual investors like Morgan Stanley MD Hemant Gupta, CRED founder Kunal Shah, BookMyShow founder Ashish Hemrajani, True North Partner Haresh Chawla, and Lenskart founder Peyush Bansal, among others, have also participated in the fundraise.
Founded in April 2017 by Akshay Chaturvedi, Leverage Edu’s core business allows universities in the developed world to attract students from emerging economies. For students, the company has built an outcome-focused technology-led counseling platform that gives them access to a one-stop dashboard for their entire study abroad journey. The platform also helps students with services like visas, accommodation, and education loans. Leverage Edu also operates Univalley.com, which provides advisory, tech, and recruitment solutions to partner universities across the globe.
Leverage Edu helps students figure out what they should do and where they should be at, wherever that be in the world – to realise their full potential. It helps students navigate & assess their journey thus far, matches them to personalised mentors, counsels them towards their higher education dream with an employability lens, and makes sure that everyone punches way above their weight to make dreams come alive and truly be able to level up.
Commenting on the latest development, Founder and CEO of Leverage Edu, Akshay Chaturvedi, said,
“We have grown over 12x in revenue between February ‘21 & ‘22, and have crossed the $20 million annualised revenue milestone now. The team has done this while cutting customer acquisition costs by 66 per cent, thanks to over 20 percent of our business now coming from referrals while another 35 per cent is from different product channels.”
Chaturvedi further added:
“The platform is seeing a double digit growth of organic traffic which was at 30 million last year and is expected to be over 100 million this year”.
“The market is massive, but needs to be dealt with a lot more caution on all sides. Students have their careers at stake and at the same time, universities are very particular about the quality of students they bring in”, he said.
The startup has recently launched the “Study Abroad with LeverageEdu” app, which has over 50,000 downloads already.
Leverage Edu also announced its foray into financial services early this year. It is now awaiting an FFMC license from RBI, which will further boost its foreign remittance business. While the company doesn’t give out loans on its own balance sheet, it has been growing fast as it aims to hit an INR 500 crore loan book soon.
Talking about the fundraise, Principal of Kaizen Private Equity, Gaurav Jain, said,
“We have been looking at various companies in the overseas student mobility space and are happy to have partnered with LeverageEdu, a company with the right product positioning, traction & stage to work together with on the growth journey.”
In September 2021, Leverage had announced an office in the UK, and last week it announced an Australia office – both of which are B2B set-ups that cater to universities. Currently, the firm sends students from India and Nigeria, as its core markets, and plans to launch in other markets post this fundraise.
Leverage Edu had raised an undisclosed amount of growth capital from Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Oyo India and Southeast Asia CEO Rohit Kapoor, and others in September last year. The same year, it raised $6.5 million in a Series A round led by Tomorrow Capital and $2 million in a debt financing round from Trifecta Capital in February and June respectively.
