ExtraaEdge Technology Solutions Private Limited, a Pune based B2B SaaS Admission & Marketing Automation CRM Platform for the Education Industry, announced that it has raised US$700k (INR 5cr) in a Pre-Series A round led by Sprout Venture Partners and Indian Angel Network.
TiE Pune Angels, First Cheque LLP, UIncept and other angels also participated. The company had raised a seed round earlier from few HNIs.
Founded in 2015 by Abhishek Ballabh and Sushil Mundada, ExtraaEdge provides ‘market-first enrollment solutions’ for the Education Industry. Its primary solution is a cloud-based data science powered platform for student acquisition, admission management, marketing automation, conversational AI bots and a full stack CRM. The company empowers Educational Institutes to make smart data driven enrollment decisions and increase admission conversions & optimization of marketing spend.
ExtraaEdge has been adopted by over 130+ education institutes in India and overseas across Universities, Test Prep, Vocational, & EdTech verticals. The fast-increasing client list includes MIT Group, Jain University, CMR University, ASM Group, ALLEN, FIITJEE’s myPAT, Aakash Digital, Deeksha Learning, ICA Eduskills, K11 Academy of Fitness Sciences, etc. who run their entire admission, marketing & outreach on ExtraaEdge platform. The company plans to use the funds for expanding its customer footprint, strengthen its data science team & product depth. It will also use this capital to expand into it’s the international markets.
Abhishek Ballabh, Co-Founder @ ExtraaEdge, said, “Education Marketing is going through a paradigm shift. Education sector spending is growing at 18% CAGR and expected to reach ~ US$30 Bn by 2025. Students need to make judicious choices. Universities and Education Institutes across the globe need to make efficient decisions on acquiring good students. The admission teams need to understand intent & behavioral signals which becomes the key to build brand, powerful outreach campaigns & the ultimate admission strategy. The full-stack admission platform powered by data science from ExtraaEdge CRM provides marketing automation to power the education admission technology of tomorrow.
Commenting on the fund raise, Sahil Gupta, from Sprout Venture Partners, said, “ExtraaEdge is providing educational institutes a data driven tool to manage and automate their sales and leads processes. We also see some very relevant applications of using AI in this space to predict admissions as we gather large amounts of data. With increasing spends in digital marketing in education and training, there is a growing need for such products. International markets like Middle East and Asia also offer great opportunities.”
Akhil Daswani, from IAN, added “ExtraaEdge is exciting for three reasons- 1. Admissions marketing is a massive pain point with a high spend on client acquisition in terms of money and time, ExtraaEdge helps streamline the process and improve conversions using data analytics. We believe this market will keep growing both in India and overseas. 2. They are constantly developing their product, its evolved tremendously over the past few years to meet their clients’ needs. 3. Abhishek & Sushil are dynamic entrepreneurs who we believe have the right drive and skillset to take this business to greater heights.
Shashank Deshpande, TiE Pune Angels – “We are excited with applications of machine learning & prediction technologies from ExtraaEdge that can reliably in the future predict enrolments empowering admission teams of 130+ institutions to make data-driven decisions and impact admission conversion by more than 40%.
