This CRM startup is giving educational institutes an ExtraaEdge in the admissions game

Abhishek Ballabh and Sushil Mundada worked at HSBC GLT as a data architect and CRM business analyst, respectively. While working in the financial sector, the duo realised how harnessing the power of data science and CRM could augment growth of any company, across industry. 

Soon, the duo figured out that the education market was growing at a fast pace. Abhishek, the Co-founder of ExtraaEdge, which offers admissions and marketing automation tools designed for the education industry, says spending in education sector is growing at 18 percent CAGR and is expected to reach $30 billion by 2025. 

Students need to make judicious choices even as educational institutes across the globe need to make efficient decisions on acquiring good students, Abhishek says. Admission teams need to understand intent and behavioural signals, which becomes the key to build brand, powerful outreach campaigns, and the ultimate admission strategy. 

“Having worked with data science and CRM, we sensed the need for the education industry to have a SaaS-based CRM model to streamline admission processes. This need led to the idea to build the first market-first enrolment solution for the education industry,” Abhishek says. 

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Focus on the B2B side of education 

In 2016, the duo started ExtraaEdge in Pune. 

The startup helps the education industry increase, manage, and predict admissions. The ExtraaEdge CRM provides marketing automation to power admission technology at educational institutes.

“We focus on increasing student admissions and optimising marketing costs through automation and analytics, enabling educational institutes to automate, streamline, and manage student admission funnels,” Abhishek says. 

Behavioural analytics also let institutes measure their ROI during the critical admission period, take course-corrective measures, optimise efforts to the granular level, and much more. 

“On the admissions side we saw how any educational institute – school, university, B-school, test prep, vocational, skill development, and employability – was moving to digital spending to attract GenZ and new-age students. This made the complete admission process, brand, and outreach consultative in nature,” Abhishek says.

How does the platform work?

ExtraaEdge started operations in 2016 in Pune when educational institutes were yet to completely adopt to technological changes and needs. But when institutes saw that its consumers, the students, were so tech-savvy, the team managed to convince them.

Today, over 135 educational institutes and around 3,000 admission teams run their admissions, outreach, and campaigns on ExtraaEdge’s admission software. 

The platform offers full-stack CRM, marketing automation and drip, predictive analytics, conversation marketing platform, chatbot, mobile and field sales CRM, and application form and workflow management. 

“The CRM product works on the core values of Integrate, Qualify, Communicate, and Measure. Integrating all the lead sources leads to a single platform to increase response times to prospects and to reduce lead leakage,” he says. 

Qualify helps identify and score prospect students through their online activity, chat and call history, social behaviour, and admission journey. Communicate enables seamless periodic communication, followed up with automated enrolment workflows during the critical admission cycle. 

“And then we help measure actionable data across marketing, courses, admissions and counsellors to make data-driven decisions,” Abhishek says.  

Apart from the two founders, the team consists of 39 people.

The model and clients 

The team charges a SaaS yearly subscription that starts at $750 per year. 

ExtraaEdge works across different platforms. Its clients include coaching institutes like Deeksha Learning, Aakash Digital, and Allen Career Training, and universities such as like Ganpat University, Avantika University, Whistling Woods, ASM Group of Institutes, Himalayan University, Career Point, CMR University, Jain University, Krupanidhi Group of Institutions, and BS Abdur Rahman Crescent Institute of Science And Technology. 

Vocational institutes like K11 Academy of Fitness Science, ICA Edu Skills, Orane International School of Beauty and Wellness are also working with ExtraaEdge. 

The startup has raised $700,000 in a pre-Series A round from undisclosed investors. It claims to have gross margins of 60 percent to 70 percent. 

A KPMG report estimates that the edtech market will touch $1.96 billion by 2021. Startups like Bhopal-based CollegeKhabri are focused on the B2B segment of learning, while CollegeDekho too is focussed on the B2B2c side. However, ExtraaEdge aims to help build the college admission process. 

Speaking of future plans, Abhishek says the startup plans to expand its footprint in international markets. “We also want to strengthen the data science team, and increase the product depth. Alongside, we want to build a great team where we focus on cultural integrity, have fun, and keep learning,” Abhishek says. 

(Edited by Teja Lele Desai)