IIT Madras-incubated edu-tech start-up GUVI raises 6 crore funding amid COVID-19 lockdown

GUVI (www.guvi.io), a start-up incubated by IIT Madras and CIIE.CO-IIM Ahmedabad has raised Rs 6 Crore in its Pre-series A round of funding from Education Catalyst Fund, an education-focused venture capital fund managed by CBA Capital. An integrated ed-tech platform providing course contents in vernacular languages as well, GUVI has a deep penetration in India with presence in over 1,000 engineering colleges.

During this current lockdown to prevent the spread of COVID-19, GUVI attracted over 1.5 lakh enrolments in technical courses in a period of 12 day.  Due to the lockdown, not only students but working professionals are also enrolling for their tech courses.

GUVI offers an online platform for students to learn in their mother tongues and provides specialized courses to upskill students and make them ‘job ready’ without having to leave their house. It has already upskilled more than 2.14 lakh engineers in latest technology skills such as Python, Java and Machine Learning, among others and help them gain placement in IT firms.

GUVI was founded by SP Balamurugan, Arun Prakash and Sri Devi and offers technical courses created by industry experts in vernacular languages.

Highlighting the boost this fund-raising will impart to GUVI in its mission to take technology skills to all deserving students, Balamurugan, Chief Executive Officer, GUVI, said, “We will use the capital raised in this round to scale up operations, introduce newer courses in more vernacular languages and expand our geographical presence for our blended (offline + online) learning program ‘Zen class’ (www.guvi.io/zen). During the lockdown, we are experiencing a huge surge in a number of people signing up to our online courses and we expect this trend to continue even after it.”

GUVI is working to ensure demography is never a barricade to acquire skills. Towards this, GUVI offers technology skills that are in-demand in the industry in regional languages such as Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Hindi, and Bengali besides English.

Speaking about the factors that led to their investment in GUVI, Bhavesh Hemani of CBA Capital, said, “The business model of GUVI is the 21^st Century skilling solution that the country needs right now. GUVI offers the perfect blend of online and offline courses with rising demand and early success evidenced by high rate of employment for students.” 

CBA Capital is the manager of two Venture Capital funds focused on education, skilling and livelihoods solutions. Some of the other young companies in the ECF portfolio include Gyandhan – Student Finance Solutions; Imarticus – Skilling programs in High Finance and Big Data; Skillenza – Hackathon Platform; Schoolmitra – School Infrastructure Provider; Buddy4study – Scholarship Management Platform.

GUVI is transforming lives by offering tech skills in languages which students are familiar with and most comfortable with and is also bridging the gap between academia and industry.