“There is more money in the market than good businesses,” Simplilearn founder, Krishna Kumar on the $10 million series B funding

“Investors fund companies so that they get returns and make money,” says Krishna Kumar, founder of Simplilearn, as a matter of fact. Yes, there are romantic opinions about investors needing to make riskier and more ambitious investments, but at the end of the day, their hands are also tied to an extent. Funds need to return money to their LPs and hence businesses that make money quickly are of immediate relevance to them.

Simplilearn is a Bangalore based provider of online training and professional certification courses and the company recently announced that it has raised $10-million in Series B funding from Helion Venture Partners and Kalaari Capital. “There is more money in the market than good businesses,” says Krishna. The funding will allow the company to diversify and expand its course catalogue to add more categories, focus on improving customer engagement by adding local team members in the US, UK, Australia and the Middle East, and enhance its technology platform to make courses available on mobile devices. The company has more than 500 members as of now and is on course to reach the 100 crore revenue mark during 2013-14.

Simplilearn was launched in 2009 as a blog that shared ideas on project management and offered PMP aspirants information about certification and professional training. In April 2010, Simplilearn introduced an “blended model” approach to PMP training, which entailed a mix of classroom and online training and a year later, the site began offering additional courses across categories. Simplilearn now offers online training, blended classroom training and exam practice tests 24*7, in over 80 courses across 11 major categories. To date, the company has trained over 75,000 professionals in over 150 countries around the world.

Talking more on the fund raising side, Krishna and the core team started thinking about raising a series B in January 2013 and were in talks with investors by February. By April, Simplilearn had received a few termsheets and the deal closed in a total of 6 months. “It was not very difficult for us as we had done really good growth in the last one year. We also had offers from various investors,” says Krishna.

Website: Simplilearn