Bangalore: In an angel round of funding led by Mumbai Angels, Bangalore based education technology startup CarveNiche raised 1 crore. The company plans to use the fund to expand the sales team, product development and R&D. Most part of the funds shall be utilized for sales and marketing. A part of it will be invested in further strengthening the technology platform.

Founded in 2010 by two women entrepreneurs, Avneet Makkar and Saraswathy A, CarveNiche Technologies is an education technology company that offers products and services for K-12, higher education, corporate, government, publishing houses and training institutes.

Avneet, Co-Founder, CarveNiche, says about the interest of the investing firm in the company, “Mumbai Angels being a sector agnostic fund does recognize immense growth opportunities in Indian Education sector as well. With educational reform on the way and increasing awareness, they foresee educational sector as a growing market and therefore having a company like CarveNiche added to their portfolio made sense.”

Avneet also handles the post of President- Business Strategy and Operations of the firm. Prior to this, she has worked with Infosys and Tata. She is a graduate in Computer Science and Engineering from National Institute of Technology, Warangal.

Saraswathy is the President- Engineering and Technology of CarveNiche. Prior to this, she was a senior member of the Technology Leadership team at Infosys. She is an Open Group Certified Enteprise Architecture practitioner and IBM SOA certified professional. Saraswathy has authored several technical papers and holds a degree in Bachelor of Information Science and Technology from Bangalore University.

According to the CLSA report, the K-12 segment is estimated at US$20bn. Out of this the market for technology and content is estimated to be US$1.2bn. The market is expected to grow at 75-80% CAGR here for the next several years. Avneet says, “There is a huge market for direct sales to schools. We also plan to reach directly to the parents through our innovative remediation platform for Kids. The product of the company aims at bringing the best practices in pedagogy together with the latest technology to engage learners, improve learning outcomes and achieve excellence in education. With employee strength of 32 people, the company currently offers their e-learning to 11 schools and plans to expand it to another 50 schools by the end of the year.

Commenting on the competition, Avneet adds, “WisdomLeap from CarveNiche is a holistic one stop solution for learning in Schools today. It encompasses the complete life cycle of learning integrating every stakeholder in the learning process from principals to parents. We do see the solution having certain overlaps with products offered by other vendors in the learning space like for instance digital content providers. But the market for education and technology is so huge in India and relatively few players that actually focus on world-class holistic learning solutions.”