Prozo.com, an online market to buy and sell book and other study material, has raised seed funding of $205,000 from many investors that include Nalin Jain, president and CEO of GE’s transportation businesses; Shomil Pant, head strategy at Wockhardt Pharmaceuticals; Dinesh Kundu; an unnamed McKinsey & Co director and other angel investors.
With the new funds, the company plans to invest in talent acquisition, marketing and mobile app development.
Prozo claims to be a search engine where students can buy books, e-learning content, coaching material and personal notes. The orders are processed through its mobile app.
It also allows students appearing in competitive exams to seek guidance from students who have cleared these exams. The platform also offers in-built ratings, reviews and blogs.
As per its website, about 200 publishers and 60 digital content producers such as Aakash Institute, CrackVerbal, Brilliant Tutorials, Plancess, learnpedia, Meritnation and Toppr.com are selling on its platform. It aims to launch a series of general, trade (fiction as well as non-fiction) and education books (school K-12 and test preparation) soon.
Founded in 2015 by Dr Ashvini Jakhar and Jerry Jose, the startup Prozo is an aggregator and marketplace for all types of exam preparation content and mentorship programmes. The idea for the startup popped out when he personally faced some pain points while preparing for the competitive entrance exams
”Smartphone penetration among our target segment i.e students is very high so it is natural next step for us to engage them through mobile application,” said Jakhar.
The edutech startup market has been creating and attracting huge interest among the investors. So many startups like US-based Coursera, India-based Suphalaam Technologies and many more have attracted big investments recently.
Last month ed-tech platform Unacademy raised Rs 6.7 crore from a clutch of investors including Flipkart co-founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal and Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma.
Among other ed-tech startups, Oliveboard has raised funding from the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation while CollegeDekho.com, run by GirnarSoft Education Services Pvt. Ltd, has raised $2 million in its pre-Series A funding round from London-based Man Capital LLP.
In late February, ed-tech firm Carveniche Technologies Pvt. Ltd secured angel funding from Calcutta Angels, Lead Angels and a bunch of wealthy individuals.