Popular online exam preparation platform Pariksha recently raised Rs 4 crore in a Pre-Series A funding round led by India’s leading incubator Venture Catalysts.
According to reports, Venture Catalysts’s investors who participated in the round included Sunil Kumar Singhvi of South Handlooms, Jayant Mehrotra of Lodha Group, Nirav Panchmatia of Aum Financial Advisors, Aditya Khurana of The Little Company Day Care Solutions, among others.
Pariksha helps candidates prepare various government job exams through its analytics driven, gamification modeled, adaptive testing and mastery learning based platform.
With the government job exams slowly transitioning online, Pariksha serves ‘Bharat’, where 13.6 crore candidates apply for government jobs annually, of which 7.5 crore apply to state government jobs writing the exams in vernacular language, who do not have access to laptops or desktops at home or in school in order to be able to practice for a computer based test (CBT).
Speaking on its latest investment in Pariksha, Apoorv Ranjan Sharma, Co-Founder & President of Venture Catalysts, said:
“The Indian academic scenario proposes a huge market for edtech platforms, and Pariksha has already established itself as a strong player in this segment. Pariksha’s team has a clear vision and a massive target audience spanning not only tier-II, III cities and rural regions, but also a certain student demographic in urban centers.”
Meanwhile, Karanvir Singh, Co-Founder of Pariksha, said in a statement that, “This investment will help us to strengthen our product offerings, bolster back-end operations and expand our reach all over India.”
Pariksha offers a subscription-based vernacular online test preparation mobile application where aspirants can pay, learn and prepare for various government examinations anywhere, anytime. The startup has also launched a physical prepaid subscription card, known as Safalta, to enable offline transaction in the rural cash economy for candidates who are not comfortable making online transactions available at retail outlets across the State.
Born out of personal experience, Pariksha’s mission is to change the way students prepare competitive exams and succeed with the help of cutting edge technology. The Pune-based startup is currently operating across six states in the country with 25,000 paid subscribers and over one million users. The languages currently available on the platform include Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Bengali and English.
