Financepeer raises $31 mn in funding led by QED Investors, Aavishkaar

Edu-fintech startup Financepeer has mopped up USD 31 million (about Rs 235 crore) in Series-B funding led by US-based venture capital fund QED Investors, domestic investor Aavishkaar Capital and Ardent Ventures.

This is the second funding for the city-based startup, which is the industry leader with over 40 per cent externally-funded education fee market.

Over 10,000 educational institutions are registered on its platform, which is home to around 4 million students. The Google-incubated startup had its first round of funding in 2020 when it raised USD 3 million.

The USD 31-million funding round was led by the Virginia-based venture capital fund QED Investors, Mumbai-based Aavishkaar Capital and US-based edutech investor Ardent Ventures, Financepeer cofounder and chief executive Rohit Gajbhiye told PTI on Wednesday.

The current round also saw participation from DMI Sparkle Fund, DMI, 9Unicorn, LC Nueva AIF and Maxar VC, he said.

Financepeer was cofounded in 2017 by IIT/IIM/Stanford alumni Rohit Gajbhiye, Sunit Gajbhiye, Naveesh Reddy and Debi Prasad Baral to help make quality education accessible to all by funding tuition fees.

Rohit Gajbhiye said the firm will deploy the fund to enhance its technology platform and offerings, expand and strengthen its education-institution partnerships, and deepen its reach in rural areas to enable more students, especially the girl students, get easy access to quality education.

The startup has partnered with over 10,000 educational institutions spanning 100 cities delivering affordable fee financing solutions, content, and fee payment solutions. The institutions it has tied up range from pre-schools, K-12, colleges, universities, offline test prep, edutech and skilling.

Gajbhiye said Financepeer has processed over USD 100 million worth of fees on its platform since its inception in 2017, helping hundreds of thousands of students get quality education.

He said the private education fee market in the country is more than USD 216 billion annually spent by over 362 million students.

While it has served over 3 million students so far, Gajbhiye said over 1.3 lakh students are still live customers and hopes to take the numbers of students covered to 1 million by the end of this fiscal year.

In 2021, it added over 6,000 institutions against 4,000 in 2020 with 1.4 lakh students, to its platform taking the number to over 10,000 and with a student population of 3.5-4 million students. And he hopes to service 1 million students this fiscal.

When asked about profitability he said on a unit price basis, it is profitable as they are still in customer acquisition pace, where to add a new student it has to spend around Rs 250 and to retain one spends around Rs 200.