[100 Emerging Women Leader] How Eela Dubey is enabling sound investment decisions for higher education

When Eela Dubey was a student, she realised that many people, especially parents, needed help to make sound education investments.

“I was an ambitious kid who had made it to her dream college. But when it was time to pay the tuition fee, I had to shell out an enormous $250,000. So, I financed it in fragmented ways. My parents helped me in every possible way, and I had to rely on student loans and had to work. But this entire experience was a learning opportunity for me. I realised how challenging it could be to finance higher education,” Eela recalls.

After taking a sabbatical, Eela met her now co-founder Arindam Sengupta and began researching the scope of a product that would provide solutions for funding higher education.

“Over the research period, we spoke to over 500 parents and tried to understand how they planned for higher education for their children. We found that most parents were shocked to know the actual cost of funding their children’s education. They were not doing their research and were unaware of the inflation in the education market,” she shares.

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Today, Eela Dubey is the co-founder of the investment adviser platform EduFund, which helps parents make sound investment decisions for their children’s higher education.

Eela explains that in a country like India where many parents solely rely on academic achievements to set their children’s future, some don’t make proper financial decisions to fund their education. 

After researching for two years, Eela and Arindam established EduFund in February 2020. However, building a startup that combined education and finance proved to be a task, especially during the pandemic. 

“One of the biggest challenges was hiring a remote team who would trust you. Finding credibility as a startup can also be difficult. It is not just about founders giving opportunities, but also people taking early bets on you,” Eela states.

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For Eela, the biggest challenge was operating an edu-fintech company without having any background in tech. 

“My only experience with code was attending HTML classes as a 10-year-old,” Eela jokes. “But I hired engineers and learnt how the tech part worked. And it was a massive learning curve for me.”

She also feels women are highly underrepresented in finance, especially in India.

“It is interesting to observe the dearth of women in this space. I see the male-female dynamics when I talk to co-founders of similar companies and I don’t see many women in leadership positions. But that is not something which cannot be changed. I think more women need to come up and take ownership and have confidence in their knowledge.”