Education eCommerce Startup Fastudent Raises Pre-Series A Funding

Fastudent, Indian B2B2C education e-commerce marketplace has announced a Pre-Series A fund raise from a group of investors including Kanwaljit Sing (Fireside Ventures), Ajay Lakhotia (former Vertex Venture Director) and Pavan Ongole (former SoftBank Director). Ashish Gupta, Trustee Ashoka University and former COO of eValueServe who invested in angel round also participated.

Founded by Gaurav Barman and Geetanjali Khanna, the e-commerce start up will utilize this round of funding to expand into Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune etc and strengthen their technology platform. Fastudent currently offers this service to schools in Delhi NCR only.

Commenting on the funding, Kanwaljit Singh, Founder Fireside Ventures , said: “Fastudent has tapped into a consumer need for School-endorsed education supplies - coupled with the convenience of e-commerce deliveries. The young & dynamic team intends to service the education fraternity like never before by creating a highly personalized brand experience for its audience."

Fastudent with its current capability to service the complete education bandwidth viz. from Playgroups to Post Graduation, has partnered with more than 200 education institutes. Using Fastudent’s exclusive technology platform, the institutes can now have their own customized white labeled e-Commerce stores .The Company runs end to end operations to support the transactions received on these stores from order receipt till the last mile delivery.

With a dedicated consumer base of 1.2 million students, Fastudent has serviced more than 90,000 orders till date.

Ajay Lakhotia, ex-Vertex Venture, added "Vertical E-Commerce has the capability to build specialized products and services around its target audience and develop deeper engagement with customers. Fastudent could eventually become the 8dol.com of India." (8Dol.com, a Chinese campus O2O services provider backed by several VC investors, and has raised an extended Series B round worth RMB200 million ($30 million).

Servicing an unprecedented range of academic supplies ranging across 32 categories including Books, Stationery, Digital Learning, Branded Merchandise, Augmented Reality, Sports, Uniforms, Shoes and more, the edTech startup boasts of a focused educational catalogue of 1,00,000 + products, spanning across 500 brands.

“...I believe Fastudent will be India's #1 student network aligned with parents and teachers. From a curated marketplace for every purchase in a school year, to a deeper understanding of their needs around learning…” added Softbank’s Pavan Ongole.

Speaking about the development, Geetanjali Khanna, Co-founder & COO, Fastudent added, “India’s education supplies market is highly fragmented and disorganized, we at Fastudent are relentlessly engaged to bind the Indian education sector. Our focus is to provide a blended module of consultative, customized and modularized digital learning to learners. We aim to make "Education a happy experience" for students, parents and institutions."

Ashish Gupta who invested in the previous round stated , " The model has blended into the existing education ecosystem faster than our expectations."The last few months have been phenomenal in terms of the numbers and the market validation has been extremely encouraging. In the coming months, the team is going to build a strong foothold in the education supplies market.”

In November 2015, the company had secured seed investment from a group of marquee angel investors led by Mr. Ashish Gupta, Founder and Trustee at Ashoka University.

Education eCommerce Startup Fastudent Raises Pre-Series A Funding

Fastudent, Indian B2B2C education e-commerce marketplace has announced a Pre-Series A fund raise from a group of investors including Kanwaljit Sing (Fireside Ventures), Ajay Lakhotia (former Vertex Venture Director) and Pavan Ongole (former SoftBank Director). Ashish Gupta, Trustee Ashoka University and former COO of eValueServe who invested in angel round also participated.

Founded by Gaurav Barman and Geetanjali Khanna, the e-commerce start up will utilize this round of funding to expand into Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune etc and strengthen their technology platform. Fastudent currently offers this service to schools in Delhi NCR only.

Commenting on the funding, Kanwaljit Singh, Founder Fireside Ventures , said: “Fastudent has tapped into a consumer need for School-endorsed education supplies - coupled with the convenience of e-commerce deliveries. The young & dynamic team intends to service the education fraternity like never before by creating a highly personalized brand experience for its audience."

Fastudent with its current capability to service the complete education bandwidth viz. from Playgroups to Post Graduation, has partnered with more than 200 education institutes. Using Fastudent’s exclusive technology platform, the institutes can now have their own customized white labeled e-Commerce stores .The Company runs end to end operations to support the transactions received on these stores from order receipt till the last mile delivery.

With a dedicated consumer base of 1.2 million students, Fastudent has serviced more than 90,000 orders till date.

Ajay Lakhotia, ex-Vertex Venture, added "Vertical E-Commerce has the capability to build specialized products and services around its target audience and develop deeper engagement with customers. Fastudent could eventually become the 8dol.com of India." (8Dol.com, a Chinese campus O2O services provider backed by several VC investors, and has raised an extended Series B round worth RMB200 million ($30 million).

Servicing an unprecedented range of academic supplies ranging across 32 categories including Books, Stationery, Digital Learning, Branded Merchandise, Augmented Reality, Sports, Uniforms, Shoes and more, the edTech startup boasts of a focused educational catalogue of 1,00,000 + products, spanning across 500 brands.

“...I believe Fastudent will be India's #1 student network aligned with parents and teachers. From a curated marketplace for every purchase in a school year, to a deeper understanding of their needs around learning…” added Softbank’s Pavan Ongole.

Speaking about the development, Geetanjali Khanna, Co-founder & COO, Fastudent added, “India’s education supplies market is highly fragmented and disorganized, we at Fastudent are relentlessly engaged to bind the Indian education sector. Our focus is to provide a blended module of consultative, customized and modularized digital learning to learners. We aim to make "Education a happy experience" for students, parents and institutions."

Ashish Gupta who invested in the previous round stated , " The model has blended into the existing education ecosystem faster than our expectations."The last few months have been phenomenal in terms of the numbers and the market validation has been extremely encouraging. In the coming months, the team is going to build a strong foothold in the education supplies market.”

In November 2015, the company had secured seed investment from a group of marquee angel investors led by Mr. Ashish Gupta, Founder and Trustee at Ashoka University.

Fastudent launches India’s First B2B2C platform for Education Supplies

Fastudent.com, India’s leading online platform for education supplies, is now India’s first and only B2B2C DIY education e-commerce platform. It has partnered with more than 200 education institutes to help them create their own customized virtual shops - using the Fastudent exclusive technology platform.

Branded e-stores for education institutes are activated in less than 48 hours on the Fastudent proprietary platform. The education focused e-commerce platform facilitates the academic buying of each student of a institute with pre-populated product catalogue and Predefined vendor tie-ups. This helps eliminate the hassles every stake holder in the education supply chain goes through.

Our estimates peg the annual spend for academic needs by students at approx Rs. 2 Cr per institute in urban areas. This evolution in Education supplies market enables the educational institute to facilitate these supplies in desired quality and quantity for their students, without spending precious time or dealing with haphazard local supplies markets. The curated and endorsed catalogue of each institute empowers their students with the right means to quality education and better access to their classroom requirements.

Gaurav Barman, Founder & CEO, Fastudent , emphasizes, "This unique product has been built to evolve into a robust and responsive offering, which can be easily customised by the institute to take the shape of its needs using D-I-Y features. The technology being developed is both flexible and scalable, to service the large market demand, yet be personalized for every institute. We have taken the best of the SAAS eCommerce platforms and have gone a step ahead to combine it with the complete end to end marketplace offerings. We have invested more than 50,000 manhours in builiding this technology which is currently in its beta stage."

It is now the only company to offer marquee names like Ramagya , Kidzee , Bharat Ram Global and many more , an opportunity to ‘OWN’ their stores online. With this new development, students can now simply order their school recommended academic requirements from the convenience of their digital devices, on their laptops and mobiles. Each e-store is customized and approved by the education institute to offer its students a never-seen-before range of products, specially curated to suit the institute's curriculum.

Geetanjali Khanna, Founder & COO, Fastudent stated, “Fastudent facilitates school vendor tie-ups, integration, inventory management, delivery and fulfillment to ensure quick and convenient access to essential education supplies and to accessories which have been imparted in education system as value added learning elements required for extracurricular cases.”

She further added, “This unique proprietary platform has evolved out of the pain points of our customers and is focused on the Indian education system and its shortcomings. This model is not a copy-paste of any global model, it’s a genesis to solve the rudimentary problems within the academic supplies market in India. Our Partner institutes are benefiting from the flexibility of the solution and the wide variety of product portfolio available at Fastudent"

Clocking 100% M-O-M growth with the largest educational supplies portfolio spanning 500 brands and 1,00,000 academic products, Fastudent services an unprecedented range of academic supplies ranging across 32 categories including Digital Learning, Branded Merchandise, Augmented Reality, Sports Goods, Uniforms, Shoes, Books ,Stationery and more. With a dedicated consumer base of 1.2 million students , Fastudent has serviced more than 90,000 orders till date.

The robust technology D-I-Y platform has swiftly on-boarded 200 schools across Delhi NCR . They are in the process of expanding rapidly with an objective to be present in 3 cities and onboarding 1000 schools by the beginning of next year.

Education ECommerce Startup Fastudent Raises Seed Funding From Group of Angel Investors

Noida-based Fastudent, an education e-commerce start-up, has announced that it has raised a round of seed investment from a group of marquee angel investors led by Mr. Ashish Gupta, Founder and Trustee at Ashoka University.

Founded by IIT-IIM alumunus, Gaurav Barman and Geetanjali Khanna, Fastudent claims to be India’s first complete education e-commerce start-up offering an innovative educational products aggregator – helps Students, Parents, Schools and Teachers across the bandwidth - from Play Groups to Post Graduation to fulfill their academic needs. It offers one of its kind e-commerce enabling technology platforms to enable education Institutes to bring e-Commerce in their own fold of offerings. The change drives a lot more convenience and access to high quality academic content for their students in Metros and Tier – 2 & 3 cities as well.

Gaurav Barman, built a career solving technology problems for global companies, and Geetanjali Khanna, is a retail industry veteran and an expert on operations and supply chain management, planned to use technology extensively to reduce the operational inefficiencies of the Indian education market. This enables access to the best quality of education products for education institutes across India, even in the remotest parts of the country.

This round of funding will be leveraged for team expansion, strengthening the technology and increasing the geographical footprint. The company plans to hire over 90 people over the next 6 months. Currently Fastudent offers more than 20,000 SKUs across 8 categories - Books & Stationery, Academic Accessories, Uniforms, Games, Sports, Digital products & Customized Merchandize. They intend to extend their categories to niche and focused 32 categories, in the coming months.

More than a million learners throng this e-commerce portal, looking for a variety of products apt for fulfilling their learning needs. Fastudent, currently services more than 20,000 pincodes all across India. They are rapidly expanding their operations and plan to acquire over 10 million paying customers by the year 2018.

Speaking on the funding, Ashish Gupta, Founder, adds "Fastudent is trying to solve a very fundamental problem of education which is the accessibility of academic needs. I am excited and happy about the fact that Fastudent is envisioning to make education reach the underprivileged sector where the core need of the education lies. The complementary skill-sets this dynamic duo brings on-board are unique and absolutely required for this business. In the last few months, the team has experimented on the minutest of details and the understanding of the business they now have, is unprecedented. They are working to enhance and bind the highly fragmented Indian education sector."

Geetanjali Khanna, Co-founder & COO, Fastudent added, "With Fastudent we aim to compliment the shift in consumption patterns of the education fraternity. The blended model of physical educational needs coupled with Consultative, Customized and Modularized Digital learning - that's our focus. We are working relentlessly to streamline the difficulties students go through on a daily basis and let them focus on what they do best viz study."