Fri. Mar 29th, 2024

Pariksha, a Pune-based exam preparation platform, has bagged ₹4 crore in a pre-Series A round led by Venture Catalysts, an incubator and accelerator. While, other 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.

Karanvir Singh, Co-Founder of Pariksha, said that this investment will help the company to strengthen its product offerings, bolster back-end operations and expand its reach all over India.

Pariksha is an online vernacular online test preparation platform helping candidates to prepare for various government examinations, which are slowly transitioning online.

The startup said that around 13.6 crore candidates apply for government jobs annually. Out of which, 7.5 crore apply for state government jobs, writing the exams in vernacular languages.

These candidates do not have access to laptops or desktops at home or in school in order to be able to practice for a CBT (Computer based test). Hence, this is where Pariksha steps in and serves them.

Apoorv Ranjan Sharma, Co-founder and President, Venture Catalysts, said, “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 centres. It is a one-stop preparatory platform for a vast number of examinations, and has an easy-to-engage interface that offers greater convenience to candidates.”

The languages available on the platform include Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Bengali & English.

Pariksha has a subscription-based mobile application where user can pay online and start practicing. The startup has also rolled out a physical prepaid subscription card 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.

Currently, the startup operates across six states in the country and boasts of 25,000 paid subscribers on the platform.

During the last 12 months, Venture Catalysts has established operations in Tier-II and III cities of Kanpur, Dehradun, Siliguri, Jaipur, Indore, Chennai, Lucknow, Trivandrum, Kolkata, Surat, Ranchi etc.

Other players in the edtech domain includes UnacademySimplilearnTopprMeritnation, and Vedantu, among many others.

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