Dive Summary:
- EduKart announced Thursday that it raised $500,000 in seed capital from institutional and angel investors including Kima Ventures, AKM Systems, Vibhor Mehra and Stanford alumni.
- Stanford grad and former Facebook employee Ishan Gupta founded the Delhi-based startup in 2011 with Indian Institute of Management grad Mayank Gupta to bring better online education to India and the rest of the developing world.
- EduKart charges between $20 and $2,400 for its open-enrollment courses, which allow students to begin studying as soon as they pay for the course, and the start-up's future plans include building a mobile platform and developing partnerships with publishers and foreign universities.
From the article:
... With broadband penetration and smartphone adoption exploding around the world, particularly in India, Gupta sees a big opportunity for education. Over the last few years, he tells us, “we’ve seen enormous growth in the number of people in India making transactions online, the number of debit cards and, overall, a huge uptick in broadband penetration.” The convergence of these three trends has led to increasing demand for web-based learning applications and, while this demand (and the online education market itself) are still nascent, Gupta believes India is at an inflection point. ...
