avagmah, the online education services company backed by serial entrepreneurs K Ganesh and Meena Ganesh, is raising Rs. 100 Cr this year as the company scales rapidly to target Asia’s growing market for online education that is poised to touch Rs. 260 Cr by 2017.
The entrepreneur couple, who recently made a strategic investment in avagmah, had previously built TutorVista into the world’s largest online tutoring provider before selling it Pearson in 2013 for Rs. 980Cr.
Avagmah had an order book of Rs. 20 Cr in 2014 and is estimating sales will grow 6x in the coming year as it expands beyond India to target the online education market in Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Middle East.
“Online education is a ‘red hot’ opportunity,” said K Ganesh. “The potential is illustrated by companies like 2U (filed for a $100mn IPO in February 2014) and EmbanetCompass (sold to Pearson for $650mn). The model has been proven in the US but has not been attempted in this region at the scale that avagmah is poised to deliver. I am confident that the US’ success in online higher education can be replicated in Asia as well.”
Karthik KS, avagmah’s Founder & CEO, said: “The phenomenal flexibility of our technology platform and the industry-relevant, world class content we offer has meant new student enrolment is increasing more than 100% y-o-y. We are looking at boosting our course offerings from the current nine to nearly 50 over the next 2-3 years and a 10x increase in student enrolment as we target the wider Asian region.”
avagmah has tie-ups for programs and certification with leading international and local partners such as the Jack Welch Management Institute at Strayer University, the only partnership of its kind that the University has outside its home market in the US. avagmah’s other academic partners include Subhash Ghai’s Whistling Woods International (Media & Entertainment), Apollo Hospitals – MedVarsity (Healthcare), IMT-Ghaziabad and Bharathidasan University.
Subhash Ghai, Indian Film Director/Producer, Founder & Chairman – Whistling Woods International (WWI) said that the partnership with avagmah had enabled the reach of WWI’s experts and expertize to increase exponentially to feed the hunger to learn among many working professionals from far flung places.
avagmah counts among its clients several industry leaders such as Convergys, Infosys, Accenture, Abbot, Titan, Airtel, HP, Glenmark, Syntel, Aditya Birla Group and Astra Zeneca who sponsor students for its online courses.
Hanumant Talwar, Managing Director and Country Manager – Convergys, said: “With avagmah, our employees at multiple locations across India have access to globally-benchmarked quality, online education programs, delivered to their laptop anytime of their choosing. Our employees now pursue higher education while continuing to work.”
