Upskilling platform Bluelearn on Wednesday said it has raised seed funding of $3.5 million (Rs 28.9 crore) co-led by Elevation Capital and Lightspeed.
The round also saw participation from Titan Capital, 2am VC, with angel investors Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal (Meesho) and Awais Ahmed (Pixxel), among others.
The Bengaluru-based startup plans to use the fresh funds for product development, hiring and to ramp up its user base.
“With the new capital we plan on accelerating our market expansion and strengthening our core tech and product teams,” said Shreyans Sancheti, co-founder, Bluelearn.
Founded in 2021 by Sancheti and Harish Uthayakumar, Bluelearn helps its members learn new skills, network with like-minded peers and get exposure from industry experts.
The startup initially started as a telegram channel for students to help each other with common questions. Subsequently, with the launch of their application, it claims to have 150,000 members from over 5,500 colleges and startups across geographies and is growing 30% month on month (MoM) organically.
Earlier, Bluelearn had raised $450,000 in a pre-seed funding led by Lightspeed with participation from 100X.VC, Titan Capital, 2am VC and others.
“Bluelearn is building both a social network and a learning destination by bringing together communities of young learners, anchored around shared interest areas,” said Amit Aggarwal, principal at Elevation Capital.
Founded in 2002, Elevation Capital is a venture capital (VC) firm that provides seed and early-stage capital. The firm announced its eighth pool of capital of $670 million in April 2022 and invests across sectors like consumer internet, software-as-a-service (SaaS), fintech, edtech, healthtech and Web3/Crypto.
Last month, VCCircle reported that Elevation Capital had invested an undisclosed amount in the Series A funding round of the social commerce platform Free Up in a Series A round.
The funding announcement comes at a time when the edtech sector is navigating an unprecedented funding crunch. However, there have been multiple deals in the sectors, although of considerably lesser deal size.
Meanwhile, Ahmedabad-based edtech startup Saarthi Pedagogy marked the final close of its pre-Series A funding round at $3.7 million Prior to that, learning management system startup Toddle secured $17 million led by Sequoia Capital India in a Series A fundraise.
