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."
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