iAccelerator alumnus Alma Connect announces angel funding of $ 250,000
AlmaConnect is a product based company that helps in connecting institutes and alumni. A graduate from the CIIE’s iAccelerator batch of 2011, the company today announced that it has received angel funding of $250,000 from CIIE - IIM Ahmedabad, IXORA Ventures, CountShop.com, Dharmendra Yashovardhan (Co-Founder, IXIGO), a few other angel investors. The investment was actually made a few months ago but the company has disclosed it now.
Gurgaon based Alma Connect has been founded by Swapnil Khandelwal and Rubish Gupta, both 2009 graduates from DA-IICT (Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information & Communication Technology). Before AlmaConnect, Swapnil was running a startup in the online tutoring space & Rubish was working as web technology evangelist in a startup (their complete story can be read here).
The company has also been awarded incubation from CEID, DA-IICT along with a seed funding of $50,000. The funding will be utilized in product development for further enhancing reach, scalability & engagement.
Currently, AlmaConnect has 45 institutes across the country paying an annual subscription cost for using the platform to connect to their alumi. On an average, 40% of the community of an institute signs up of which 30% is organic. The reason behind founding the company was that the way an institute wants to connect to alumni is different from the way & reasons, alumni want to connect to the institute’ and currently there is no place where both the stakeholders are happy.
Swapnil shares an instance, institute prefers to connect through a standalone website having full control whereas the alumni do not want one more network to adopt, or rather one more password to remember.
Talking about future plans, Swapnil informed that the company is going to launch a freemium version of the product with which any verified alumni of an institute can start an alumni network of the institute and until a specific number of users the platform can be used without any subscription cost. Following which the company would be looking to raise the next round of investment to improvise on the strong traction & huge opportunity that is being seen.
Website: AlmaConnect