Education eCommerce Startup Fastudent Raises Seed Funding

Noida-based Fastudent, an education eCommerce startup, has raised a round of seed investment from a group of angel investors led by Ashish Gupta, Founder and Trustee at Ashoka University.

Founded by IIT-IIM alumunus, Gaurav Barman and Geetanjali Khanna, Fastudent is an educational products aggregator – helps students, parents, schools and teachers across the bandwidth – from play groups to post graduation to fulfill their academic needs. It offers one of its kind eCommerce enabling technology platforms to enable education Institutes to bring eCommerce in their own fold of offerings.

This round of funding will be leveraged for team expansion, strengthening the technology and increasing the geographical footprint. The company plans to hire over 90 people over the next 6 months. Currently Fastudent offers more than 20,000 SKUs across 8 categories – Books & Stationery, Academic Accessories, Uniforms, Games, Sports, Digital products & Customized Merchandize. They intend to extend their categories to niche and focused 32 categories, in the coming months.

More than a million learners throng this eCommerce portal, looking for a variety of products apt for fulfilling their learning needs. The company currently services more than 20,000 pincodes all across India. They are rapidly expanding their operations and plan to acquire over 10 million paying customers by the year 2018.

The company is competing with online marketplaces like Flipkart, Amazon etc. which also deal in this category among others. In early 2014, vertical eCommerce site dealing in similar education products AllSchoolStuff had shut down. As of now no clear leader has emerged in this space, as the horizontal players continue to dominate.