Admission services platform AdmitKard raises Rs 50 crore from GSV Ventures

AdmitKard, an end-to-end admission services platform for students wishing to study abroad, has raised Rs 50 crore from GSV Ventures and a few smaller investors to capitalise on the surge in demand for overseas learning amid countries reopening their borders post Covid-19.

The company, which counts a bunch of edtech founders including Vamsi Krishna and Pulkit Jain of Vedantu, Gaurav Munjal and Roman Saini of Unacademy, and Mayank Kumar from upGrad among others, as its investors, raised the funds at a valuation of Rs 250 crore. The fundraiser was announced at the GSV Emeritus India Summit on February 20.

AdmitKard plans to use the funds to expand to more services, hire more people across departments and become an end-to-end admission services provider by launching services such as financing and scholarships, the company’s co-founder Piyush Bhartiya, co-founder, AdmitKard told Moneycontrol on the sidelines of the summit.

Bhartiya also said that the company plans to penetrate deeper into the country. Currently, AdmitKard has presence in about 70 cities in the country and the company plans to widen its reach to about 200–250 cities, Bhartiya said.

Founded in 2016 by former Boston Consulting Group (BCG) executives Bhartiya and Rachit Agarwal, AdmitKard is a Noida-based company that formalises the overseas admission process for students who wish to study in colleges and universities abroad. The company last raised a $3 million round in April last year. Before that, the company raised $1.37 million from a clutch of angel investors in its Seed funding round, which was led by BCG Partners.

“We have been looking for a company that is student-first and is trying to get away from the agent-led model,” said Mujtaba Wani, Principal at GSV Ventures on the speaking on the sidelines of the summit.

AdmitKard’s platform is focused on making the process as frictionless as possible, and instead of leaning on counsellors and agents to advise the students, bringing in student-mentors is the primary way that students really learn about the university experience. They've been using AI (artificial intelligence) for a long time and have been investing in like a machine learning algorithm to drive matching students with the right University fit, which makes us exited,” Wani added.

In FY21 (2020-21), the first year of Covid, AdmitKard saw a flat growth in their revenue as the Covid-19 pandemic forced countries to shut their borders. However, the company closed FY22 (2021-22) with a revenue of about Rs 4 crore and is expecting at least fourfold growth in FY23 (2022-23), Rachit Agarwal, co-founder of the company told Moneycontrol. Agarwal also said that the company turned operationally profitable for the last two months.

“Our aim is to again grow 4x and 4x for the next couple of years as we see and hence to cater the kind of demand of the students that we're talking about. We might double our team in the year to come and maybe slightly more than that,” said Agarwal.

“So we might be a 500 member team over the next 12 to 18 months. We are not going to be very rapid growth in terms of team members because for us, it is also a gestation period of our team members being able to serve because it's a critical service that we are providing,” he added.