Global study abroad platform LeverageEdu has raised $22 million Series B from Kaizenvest Private Equity, DSP Mutual Fund Group, Artha Ventures, UAE-based NB Ventures, and 9Unicorns among others. 

Blume Ventures, DSG Consumer Partners, Tomorrow Capital, Chona Group (behind Havmor), FMCG player Vicco, Mankind Pharma, Trifecta Ventures and Bennett Coleman (Times Group), and other family offices also joined the round. 

Prominent individual investors such as Morgan Stanley MD Hemant Gupta, CRED founder Kunal Shah, BookMyShow founder Ashish Hemrajani, True North Partner Haresh Chawla, Lenskart founder Peyush Bansal, ShareChat founder Farid Ahsan, Hotcourses (sold to IDP) founder Mark O’Donoghue, Skyflow’s Anshu Sharma, Eragon Ventures MD Pranabh Mody, Dynamic IT Director Henry Kane, Jio President Vikas Choudhary, entrepreneur-author Ankur Warikoo, OYO SEA CEO Ankit Tandon, among others, participated alongside syndicates from AngelList, LetsVenture and Trica Capital.

This financing round has valued the company at about $120 million. Started in April 2017 by Akshay Chaturvedi, LeverageEdu’s core business enables universities in the developed world to bring onboard students from the emerging world through a suite of products. 

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For students, LeverageEdu has a technology-led counselling platform with a one-stop dashboard for their study abroad. It launched its “Study Abroad with LeverageEdu’‘ app last month, which has over 50,000 downloads.

Expansion plans

On the fundraise, LeverageEdu’s Founder and CEO, Chaturvedi, said, “We have grown over 12x in revenue between February ‘21 and ‘22, and have crossed a $20-million annualised revenue milestone. The team has done this while cutting CAC [customer acquisition cost] by a crazy two-thirds — thanks to over 20 per cent of our business now coming from referrals, another 35 per cent from a bunch of slick product channels like virtual fair platform UniConnect, IELTS-prep product Leverage Live, the uber-popular AI Course Finder, and a growing double digit from our organic traffic, which is now the largest in the world for the category at 30 million last year and an expected 100-plus million this year.”

LeverageEdu had announced an office in the UK in September last year, and last week announced an Australian office — both B2B set-ups that build products for, and serve universities. It today sends students from India and Nigeria, as its core markets, and plans to launch in other markets after this fundraise.

LeverageEdu also announced its entry into financial services early this year. It is now awaiting an FFMC (full-fledged money changer) licence from RBI for its foreign remittance business. While the company doesn’t give out loans on its own balance sheet, it aims to hit a ₹500-crore loan book in the near future.