Edustars startup Foradian raises $2mn from Fabindia's William Bissell

Wednesday April 30, 2014 , 3 min Read

YourStory Edustars company Foradian Technologies has raised $2 million in funding from William Bissell, the MD of Fabindia, an ethnic retail chain. Foradian intends to use the funds to add more features to Fedena, its flagship product. Foradian is also looking to take the product to new markets across the globe.

Foradian Technologies was founded in 2009 by Abdulla Hisham, Abdul Salam, Arun Raveendran, Arvind G S, Unni Koroth & Vishwajith and is headquartered in Bangalore. It is a multipurpose school and campus management system. Over the past years the product has established a strong presence in the global ed-tech market and has won several awards including the Edustars back in 2012. Fedena is used by more than 40,000+ schools and colleges in 100+ countries around the world.

‘‘Adoption of Fedena in educational institutions has grown explosively over the last few years. This funding will allow us to expand our team, improve the product further and scale for future growth. It will also give a fillip to our vision of building an ecosystem around Fedena. William will be an invaluable addition to the board as we target to be a billion dollar company by the year 2020," said Unni Krishnan Koroth, CEO, Foradian about their ambitious growth plans.

The investment by William Bissell should not come as a surprise. William has a personal interest in the education sector. He is the patron of ‘The Fabindia School’ in Rajasthan and their student management system runs on Fedena.

“Educational institutions are increasingly becoming complex organisations. Fedena is a useful solution that helps integrate all the administrative functions of a school into a single, easy to use software. Fedena also has a unique business model that facilitates usage among elite institutes on the one hand and non-profit organisations, NGO’s and Government Institutions on the other. I see Fedena bringing about a similar revolution in schools and colleges as Tally has in the financial world," said William about the investment.

Foradian had launched the Fedena Marketplace in March last year with a vision to be a one-stop shop for tools needed to run an institution efficiently. The marketplace has native plugins which adds functionality to Fedena as well as integration plugins to integrate Fedena with other popular education technology software and services. Using the marketplace, the institutions are able to find professional services and hardwares to purchase.

“Fedena is being used in several developing countries and with this round of funding, we will now look to scale horizontally via expanding our business in markets like USA, Canada and Europe," said Abdulla Hisham, COO of Foradian Technolgies.

While most MOOC platforms focus on content creators, Foradian also has a product called Uzity which focusses on school and college teachers, who are the enablers on the ground.

It is quite encouraging to see investments being made in solid products like Fedena. What do you think about these investments?

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