Leverage Edu raises $22 mn in Series B funding at $120 mn valuation

Prominent individual investors like Morgan Stanley MD Hemant Gupta, CRED founder Kunal Shah, BookMyShow founder Ashish Hemrajani joined the funding round

Edtech start-up Leverage Edu has raised $22 million in its Series B round of financing that values the company at about $120 million.

The round saw participation from a consortium of funds, family offices and angels. These included Kaizenvest Private Equity, DSP Mutual Fund Group, Artha Ventures, UAE-based NB Ventures, and others.

Prominent individual investors like Morgan Stanley MD Hemant Gupta, CRED founder Kunal Shah, BookMyShow founder Ashish Hemrajani, True North Partner Haresh Chawla and Lenskart founder Peyush Bansal, among others also invest in the Series B funding.

Founded in April 2017 by Akshay Chaturvedi, LeverageEdu’s core business allows universities in the developed world to attract students from emerging economies. For students, LeverageEdu has built an outcome-focused technology-led counselling platform that gives them access to a one-stop dashboard for their entire study abroad journey. The company also launched the “Study Abroad with LeverageEdu'' app last month, which has over 50,000 downloads already.

“We have grown over 12x in revenue between February ‘21 & ‘22, and have crossed the $20 million annualised revenue milestone now. The team has done this while cutting customer acquisition costs by 66 per cent, thanks to over 20 per cent of our business now coming from referrals while another 35 per cent is from different product channels,” said Akshay Chaturvedi, founder and CEO of Leverage Edu.

Chatuvedi added that the platform is seeing a double digit growth of organic traffic which was at 30 million last year and is expected to be over 100 million this year.

Leverage had announced an office in the UK in September last year, and last week also announced an Australia office - both of which are B2B set-ups that cater to universities. It today sends students from India and Nigeria, as its core markets, and plans to launch other markets post this fundraise.

Chaturvedi said: “The market is massive, but needs to be dealt with a lot more caution on all sides. Students have their careers at stake and at the same time, universities are very particular about the quality of students they bring in”.

Leverage Edu also announced its foray into financial services early this year. It is now awaiting an FFMC license from RBI, which is expected to further bolster its foreign remittance business. While the company doesn’t give out loans on its own balance sheet, it aims to expand its loan book to Rs 500 crore in FY23.