Education Technology Startup Harnesstouch Raises INR 1 Crore from CLUB ah!

Founded in 2011, Harness Handitouch is targeting a market with potential of reaching USD 3 billion by 2015. Subramanian Viswanathan, a former McKinsey & Company consultant and IIT, Madras & ISB, Hyderabad alumni started Harnesstouch (read complete story here). Harnesstouch also happens to be a Tech30 company and a winner of Techsparks his year. The company, which operates on a B2B model in collaboration with schools, is harnessing the tablet and cloud revolutions for collaborative, blended learning. While their product is already ready for prime-time, the current funds raised from CLUB ah! will be partly used for company's sales, marketing and working capital requirements and partly for further product feature enhancements. Commenting on the investment, Subramanian Viswanathan says, “This is a great moment for us and the dealing with CLUB ah! has been very cordial. I’d say they are very entrepreneur friendly and opened the doors very quickly for us.”

The whole process took less than 6 months and Harness has already started to pump in the funding into the sales team. Harnesstouch is now a 15 member team with 5 people in Sales and 10 in Engineering. Regarding traction, Subramanian says, “We’ve got a good response from the schools and we’re closing deals with a few B-Schools in Bombay. The sales team is focusing currently in southern region with Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai being the prime targets.”

CLUB ah! is a network of over 200 investors - both individual & institutional and looks to invest between USD 100K to 1M into innovative scalable ideas. Talking about the fund, Harshad Lahoti, founding partner says, “Ours is a blue-ocean strategy. We believe, given enough awareness and education of this new investment asset class, many rich and savvy investors of today are prepared to take the plunge into angel investing."

Besides the angel investment club and the usual mentoring and consultancy services that they offer, ah! Ventures is soon looking to take all its offerings online to cater to the next level of growth and innovation.

Website: ah! Club