[Funding alert] Sunstone Eduversity raises Rs 11.3 Cr in seed funding led by Prime Venture

Sunstone Eduversity, an edtech startup focussed on the MBA institutes has raised Rs 11.3 crore in seed funding led by Prime Venture Partners, along with LetsVenture, PS1 Ventures, and Rajul Garg.

The company will use the fresh funds to build its network of colleges across various cities and strengthen its efforts in creating industry-ready professionals by investing in technology and curriculum.

At present, Sunstone has five partner institutions in three cities with 300 students. It is planning to partner with 10 more colleges and is looking to achieve a 7x growth in student enrollments with more than 2,000 students across nine cities in 2020.

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Founded by IMT-Ghaziabad alumnus Ashish Munjal and Piyush Nangru, Sunstone focusses on those MBA institutes which find it challenging to fill in students and more importantly, to place these graduates with jobs.

According to a recent study, only 36.4 percent of MBA graduates are considered employable. Another statistic shows that only 37 percent of MBA graduates across India are placed. Students who graduate from the top 100 colleges are employable, whereas students who graduate from 3,900 other colleges are not taught the right skill-sets, and the education quality, in general, is low. The curriculum taught in most of these MBA colleges is mainly theoretical and hasn’t been updated for years.

Sunstone provides an end-to-end framework which includes the curriculum, teaching faculty, and job placements. The USP of Sunstone is the Pay after Placement formal education programme, where students pay a nominal registration fee during enrollment and only after securing a job, they pay the entire course fees of the MBA programme, which is 10 times the monthly salary.

Ashish Munjal, Co-Founder, Sunstone Eduversity, said,

“We are making higher education accountable. Our model can produce industry-ready professionals who can start contributing towards an organisation’s success right from the beginning. This is the only higher education program where the success of the education provider is completely aligned with the student’s success.” 

Sunstone also works closely with corporates to develop industry-ready specialisations such as BFSI, logistics, sales management, digital marketing, among others. These programmes are designed to equip the students with the required expertise to tackle everyday business problems and build competencies across industry verticals.

Amit Somani, Managing Partner, Prime Venture Partners, said,

“In the last few decades, higher education in India has hardly seen any innovation whether in curriculum or methodology. With one of the largest youth workforce in the world and rapidly evolving new-age jobs and businesses, there is a dire need for industry-ready professionals in India. Sunstone is addressing this with technology-led pedagogy and a highly attractive business model, the Pay after Placement model brings in accountability for the students.”

(Edited by Suman Singh)

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