SkoolShop.com secures investment from Blume Ventures and other angels
A brand of Occasion Kommerce Pvt. Ltd, SkoolShop.com is a portal that brings together products related to School and Education operating on both, B2B and B2C models. In an announcement today, Blume Ventures and a few other angels have invested in SkoolShop.com. The angels include Sunil Kalra, Srikant Shastri, Vikas Choudhury and Puneet Deora. The amount of funding has been undisclosed but Blume Ventures generally co-invest in the range of $500K and $ 1.5 million.
SkoolShop.com is a Mumbai based company founded by two HBS alumni, Satya Raghavan and Anusha Mahalingam. Satya was head of marketing at Star TV before he went to Harvard Business School where he also met Anusha and SkoolShop.com took birth. Anusha was a management consultant working with the McKinsey before going to HBS.
Sharing a common interest in education, the duo put shape to the idea and started up in late 2011 and since have ramped up operations. They started up with an angel investment from Google’s Rajan Anandan and Microsoft’s Jaspreet Bindra. Focusing on products relating to school, they have more than 50,000 SKU’s which are sourced form over 300 vendors. These products range from stationary to uniforms to educational tablets. Having 35+ categories and over 250 sub categories, SkoolShop focuses highly on an efficient supply chain so that the schools can just take care of imparting education.
What excited the investors about the company apart from the team, was that the venture will organise a fragmented market. "With a diverse country like India, the business can be scaled heavily with a hybrid (online plus offline) model without much of direct competition and that too with passage of time will find ways to work together and optimize," said the spokesperson from Blume.
SkoolShop works with large school chains (more than 8) and are supplying to more than 200 schools in total currently. With offices in Delhi, Chennai and Bangalore apart from Mumbai, SkoolShop supplies throughout the nation (B2C) but has schools primarily in west and north India. SkoolShop.com is a 25+ member team and the funding will be used to hire more and ramp up marketing and sales.
Website: SkoolShop