The Venture Intelligence Blog

A Stanford Social Innovation Review article quotes Venture Intelligence data on investments in education: Corporate social responsibility funding in India has been significant, with 36 percent ($419 million)  going into education  in 2016. Impact investing, however, is yet to be tapped with only around $45 million on average per annum between 2014-2017 according to an analysis of education deals in the  Venture Intelligence database . Venture Intelligence is India's longest serving provider of data and analysis on Private Company Financials, Transactions (private equity, venture capital and M&A) & their Valuations in India.

Venture Intelligence is India's longest serving provider of data and analysis on Private Company Financials, Transactions (private equity, venture capital and M&A) & their Valuations in India.

An ET article quotes Venture Intelligence data on its report on VC investments in Edtech companies: The year 2016 has become a bonanza for the education sector, which has received investments of $323 million - surpassing the previous high of 2014 when ed-tech companies raised $223 million Strategic investors were also quite active this year, data from Venture Intelligence shows. Text book publishing company S Chand, which had raised $26 million led by IFC in 2015, has become an active strategic investor (backing several startups including Testbook). The EduPristine deal saw US-based DeVry Education Group, while Tabtor got participation from John Katzman, founder of The Princeton Review. Related Reading: PE/VC Investments in Education spike up in 2016 Venture Intelligence is India's longest serving provider of data and analysis on Private Company Financials, Transactions (private equity, venture capital and M&A) & their Valuations in India.

A Times of India article titled  Google Capital in talks to invest in ed-tech startup Cuemath quotes Venture Intelligence data on VC investments in the Education space: As per Venture Intelligence data, 23 deals worth $233 million were announced so far this year compared to $66 million across 20 deals last year(in Edtech space). The largest of the rounds came through when Byju's raised about $120 million, a mix of primary infusion of capital and secondary sale of shares, in quick time from marquee investors like the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative run by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan. Related: PE/VC Investments in Education spike up in 2016 Venture Intelligence is India's longest serving provider of data and analysis on Private Company Financials, Transactions (private equity, venture capital and M&A) & their Valuations in India.

Mint quotes Venture Intelligence data in an article covering S Chand (which has also become an active strategic investor in Education startups): In the last five years, private equity investors have invested almost a billion dollars in the education sector, according to data from Venture Intelligence, a private company financial database. Related Reading: PE/VC Investments in Education spike up in 2016 Venture Intelligence is India's longest serving provider of data and analysis on Private Company Financials, Transactions (private equity, venture capital and M&A) & their Valuations in India. 

Education related companies have already attracted PE/VC investments worth $184 million (across 11 deals) in the first 4.5 months of 2016 – 2.75 times compared to the $67 million across the whole of 2015 (17 investments). The sector is well on its way to surpass the highest ever figures ($235 M reported in 2012). Recent Deals The month of May has already witnessed three investments in test preparation and tutoring companies: EduPristine - Certification Courses - Raised $8 million from Kaizen PE & US-based DeVry Education Group Tabtor - App based Math Tutoring firm - Raised $3.7 M Series A led by Syven Capital Prepathon - Test Prep App - Blume Ventures Sector Focus In the non-regulated sectors, Test Preparation (like Byju's Classes) and Vocational Training & Certification firms (like Simplilearn & Edupristine) have been the most favored sectors by investors. The $70 million attracted by Byjus in March 2016 l...

Siddhartha Jain has a nice analysis on why we haven't seen an Indian Education Unicon emerge yet. And why we still might. Venture Intelligence is the leading provider of data and analysis on Private Company Financials, Transactions (private equity, venture capital and M&A) & their Valuations in India. Click Here to Sign Up for the FREE Weekly Edition of the Deal Digest: India's First & Most Exhaustive Transactions Newsletter.

Interesting article in Forbes India by Meeta Sengupta: If there is one system that is working to further rigour, accuracy and excellence (of sorts), it is the tutoring ecosystem...it is the tutoring system that has added the quality dimension to it. If the goal is better marks, the tuition system has delivered on it. If the goal is smaller classes, the tutoring system has delivered. If the goal is teacher accountability – again, the tutoring system has delivered excellence. ...Students are not necessarily becoming dumber or smarter; they are becoming more skilled at taking exams. This is what a tutor does – and they are good at it. Here is the interesting thing: the tutoring ecosystem has delivered on a national goal of improving standards (as measured by marks) without being organised, regulated, scaled or standardised. There are lessons here for the schooling system – both in the public and private sectors. The tutoring system has been able to deliver much more than a traditi...

Cross posted from the Entrevista Blog Interview with Ganapathy Subramaniam, Founding-CEO of Bangalore-based semiconductor tech company Cosmic Circuits. (Cosmic was acquired in early 2013 by Silicon Valley-based, Nasdaq-listed electronic design giant Cadence.) The interviewer is fellow entrepreneur Chandu Nair. The Podcast can be downloaded from here . (Use Right Click > Save As to save the file to your desktop) Highlights Reading the Wind How Ganapathy, as part of visiting customers in October 2012, realized that Cosmic Circuits could no longer remain an independent company. (Its customers and partners wanted a strong Number 2 player in the segment to provide a balance to the Number 1 player, Synopsis.)  Making the company Due Diligence ready How Cosmic's decisions to rope in a Big 4 audit firm (just five years into its existence) and go in for an ISO certification, stood it in good stead when it came to due diligence at the time of its acquisition. ...

Smart CEO has profile on this company which focuses on making youth from Tier II and III cities more employment ready. After three years of research, the Graduate Certificate in Corporate Readiness (GCCR) is a copyrighted program from TalentBridge to help students from smaller towns prepare for interviews and a corporate career. ...The company conducted an online survey, which showed that 77 per cent of the time corporates are looking for the right attitude in students, 13 per cent for communication skills, six per cent on subject knowledge and four per cent on other specific needs. The first typical question hiring managers ask candidates is, “Tell me about yourself.” ...The company has seven full time trainers and 50 empanelled trainers. They are all trained under a ‘Train the Trainer’ program, which is based on a video content TalentBridge has developed and used as a framework. In 2010-11, about 1,500 students were trained and its current year target is 5,300, which Shukla is confi...

As the only industry in which investments continued to growth through the 2008-09 downturn, Private Equity & Venture Capital investors continue to be bullish about investing in Education companies, reveals a new report – the second edition of “Private Equity Pulse on Education” - from research firm Venture Intelligence, the leading provider of data and analysis on PE/VC and M&A activity in India,. Nitish Poddar and Aneesh Vijayakar of KPMG set the tone for the report in an article highlighting the opportunities and challenges facing Private Equity investors in Education. They point out how the demand-supply gap, higher spending by consumers, superior quality perception of private sector offerings and government reforms, are set to drive growth of the industry. They highlight regulatory hurdles, need for complex structuring, lack of exit routes and shortage of management & faculty talent as key constraints for making investments. According to data from Venture Intelligence, ...

Edited excerpts from the press release: Fidelity Growth Partners India (FGPI) is to invest up to $15M to acquire a significant minority stake in Mind Shaper Technologies Private Limited. Branded as Classteacher Learning Systems, the company is a pioneer in K-12 educational content in the country. The investment will be used to further the company’s product portfolio and strengthen Classteacher’s role as an organization that combines technology and innovation as part of its commitment to education. At present the company has one of the largest repositories of digital education content in the industry with about 85,000 teaching modules mapped to multiple education boards. The company offers an integrated solution to assist teaching in classrooms using software, hardware and school support services. This provides an ideal platform to make learning an enjoyable and enriching experience. As part of this investment Mr. Kabir Narang and Mr. Raul Rai with FIL Capital Advisors (India), the pri...

From the Business Today profile of the company which enables academic admission applications to go online: The catch is that those applying have to pay extra if they want the convenience of the online route. Most institutions charge for the paper application forms they distribute; the portal charges an additional 4.9 per cent - or Rs 30 whichever is higher - per form filled online. ...Anil Joshi at venture capital firm Mumbai Angels, however, points out that Shah's business model has no intellectual property attached to the product and can be easily copied by competitors. Shah believes the institutions he has signed on will not leave him in a hurry. "Getting them to even listen to you is difficult," he says. "Once I am already in with a free product, it will be five times tougher for someone to replace me." NoPaperForms is also working on a business-to-consumer platform to engage Facebook-savvy students and spread its brand virally. This platform will let stude...

Forbes India has an article on how staffing services firm Teamlease is transforming the vocational training firm IIJT that it acquired in March 2010. If the term “university” evokes images of quadrangles, high ceilings and large windows, perish the thought. IIJT centre in Bangalore is a three-storied building not far from the bustling shops of Brigade Road. Inside, students in their late teens or early 20s occupy the classrooms — some so narrow that each row seats only four. The small, sparsely furnished offices behind the reception double up as interview rooms for visiting companies. Not your typical university campus. Yet, this could do what some of the colleges have failed to do — produce employable students. The centres would be small, functional, located close to students and most importantly, cost less. TeamLease has centralised common functions (such as HR, legal, finance and IT) even to the level of trainers. Star trainers are hard to get in the hinterland, and expensive to hi...

Businessworld has an article on the topic: To overcome this (question paper leakages), many organisations are switching over from pen and paper to computer-based testing (CBT). According to a CLSA Asia Pacific Markets 2008 report on the education sector, the market for CBT, valued at $150 million (Rs 735 crore), is expected to grow to $750 million (Rs 3,675 crore) by 2012 in India. As awareness levels grow, a rising number of service providers are entering the field — from established players such as Bangalore-based firm Eduquity, Aptech’s Attest and MeritTrac to new giants such as Pearson Vue and Prometric. “Keeping everything tamper-proof and safe is the most important component of testing,” says Uday Kulkarni, executive vice-president of Aptech and national head of the company’s testing arm, Attest. At present, only a small percentage of combined entrance tests after senior secondary are computer-based, but the numbers are set to go up massively with the government’s increased focu...

As part of its Cover Story on Education, Business Today has an article on how private ventures are now increasingly targeting the K-12 segment. Six months ago, Manipal K-12 broke new ground by taking over Sharada School, Mysore. “We offer two choices to managements of schools that fit our business model. They can either pay us to manage their schools professionally or transfer management responsibilities,” says (CEO Meena Ganesh). The firm has also taken over four schools in Nepal recently. She plans to manage 100 K-12 schools and set up six International schools in the next five years. ...The K-12 (Kindergarten to Class 12) is estimated to be worth half the $42-billion (Rs 2,01,600 crore) private education market in India and growing fast enough to double in a decade. Analysts expect the share of average household spend on education to increase from the present seven per cent to nine per cent by 2018. Technopak, a consulting firm, sees enrollments in K-12 growing to 351 million, requ...

At a time when Education has become the hottest sector for private investment, Raghav Gupta of Technopak Advisors highlights, in an article for Business Today , the key issues to evaluate when venturing into this field. Market Assessment: A pragmatic assessment of the “catchment” in each segment of education is important, from the standpoint of achieving required student enrollment, before planning an investment. The catchment (in this case the travel time to and from the institute) for a pre-school student should be 30 minutes, for a K-12 day school 60 minutes, and for a residential school, this would be five hours. Demand for a vocational training institute originates from within city premises, with few students travelling across cities for enrollment. A university or a higher education institute would ideally attract students from all parts of India as well as South Asia, the Middle East and Africa and, therefore, matters would be being dictated by the quality of education on offer...

In an article for Business Today, Gopal Jain of PE firm Gaja Capital, makes a passionate case for encouraging private enterprise in Education. The education sector is reserved for not-for profit (NFP) entities and this ensures adverse selection by blocking conscientious entrepreneurs who are unwilling to operate for-profit (FP) businesses under the guise of NFP as most currently do. ...The cap on revenues through price controls on fee and constant government sponsored inflation of expenses by obligating compliance with pay commission hikes, etc., are huge stumbling blocks...Institutional funding is unavailable: NFPs involve huge off-balance sheet settlements, rendering them out of bounds for institutional lenders and financiers. ...We can argue endlessly, but we don’t have 300 years to perfect a welfare state, like the western countries did. India’s poor understand that education is the mantra behind their emancipation and they are not willing to wait. Some 175 strife-riddled district...

In an article for Business Standard, Arvind Singhal of Technopak points out why the real transformational opportunity in Indian Education is in the vocational training segment. Vocational training, unfortunately, does not enjoy the same glamour and, therefore, it is very likely that despite having the largest young workforce in the world, India will be faced with chronic shortages in just about every category of skill-based trade jobs. Even more tragic, from India’s perspective, would be the missed opportunity in being the number one supplier of skilled trade labour to the developed and some developing countries even as many such countries, especially those in Western Europe, are faced with rapidly aging populations and fast declining birth rates, leaving them woefully short of all kinds of labour—farm workers, electricians, plumbers, masons, fitters, healthcare givers, machinery operators, cooks/chefs and the like. It would help to look at some hard data to put this challenge and the...

Extract from the speech of Manish Sabharwal, Chairman of TeamLease, at a discussion organized by Businessworld , There are basically five faultlines in education but the interesting part is that these five faultlines — quantity versus quality, repair versus prepare, price versus cost, funding versus delivery, and excellence versus inclusion — don’t only apply to higher education...How we handle the trade-offs in these five faultlines will actually decide the difference (between growth and underdevelopment). ...Finally, we have to deal with excellence versus inclusion. John Gardner, then secretary of education, US, asked a profound question: can we be equal and excellent at the same time? That’s an important question in the context of reservations, but now I think about it in terms of quality versus quantity — the entry gate versus the exit gate. So, you can be like the IITs and IIMs, with tight entry gates and wide open exit gates. Or you could be like the Chartered Accountants’ Instit...