Bengaluru: CollPoll, a Mobile-first Campus Automation Platform that helps educational institutions streamline all academic and administrative operations, announced that it has raised Rs16 crore from Prime Venture Partners. CollPoll has partnered with over 40 educational institutions with more than 100K users and is planning to add 300 more institutions with over half a million users by the end of 2022. Its customers are spread across India, Middle East, Africa, and South-East Asia and include reputed educational institutions such as O.P. Jindal Global University, Ashoka University, Manipal Dubai & Malaysia, Chitkara University, and Jagran Lakecity University, among others. The startup will use the fresh capital to further enhance the platform, hire across functions and help institutions adopt technology to provide an education that equips the students for the workplace of the future.
CollPoll has seen aggressive adoption across all sizes of educational institutions and has automated more than 3000 business processes, 150,000 applications on career opportunities, half a million assignments, four million quizzes and six million feedback. It has helped institutions improve learning outcomes, achieve academic excellence, cut down administrative costs and comply with government regulations. The CollPoll platform helps institution administrators drastically reduce paperwork and human errors by digitising hundreds of workflows within the campus and seamlessly manage critical functions such as admissions, record management, fee payments and others. It helps teachers to plan lessons in advance, manage attendance, grade assignments, and also communicate with parents and students. Students can register for events, take quizzes, join clubs and chapters, discover jobs or internships, give feedback and request leave using CollPoll.
Since the onset of the pandemic, the education sector has seen a massive transformation in operations as well as teaching & learning processes. However, institutions continue to face administrative challenges of resource optimisation, student retention and recruitment. Going beyond virtual classes, educational institutions are now focussed on adopting emerging technologies to improve student services. Various processes are being automated to reduce risks, errors and turnaround times for all aspects of the institution, be it admissions, student finance, academic processes, teaching-learning, examinations, hostels or career services. They are looking for solutions to help them integrate with other existing IT solutions such as Tally, admission CRMs, payment gateways, video conferencing tools, etc. to create a unified experience and reduce repetitive and manual transfer of data.
Today’s Gen-Z students and the upcoming Gen-Alpha kids are digital natives and far more technically savvy than any generation previously and expect a similar experience in a campus environment. The industry is being driven to transform, to keep up with student expectations on access to resources, and how they choose to communicate with their educators and peers. CollPoll is betting big on this change and will continue to invest substantially on this platform which promises to offer a system of record, engagement as well as intelligence to institutions so that they can focus on more value-add student-facing activities.
CollPoll was founded by Hemant Sahal to let stakeholders in educational institutions collaborate effectively. Since 2018, its focus has expanded to end-to-end automation of institutions far beyond the traditional ERPs. The company offers ERP for Administration, Learning Management System with Video Conferencing integration, AI-proctored Examinations, No-code Business Process Automation Engine for contactless & paperless campus, and Campus Social Network for digital engagement. CollPoll has over 40 employees and including the current round, has raised around INR 26 crore.
Says Hemant Sahal, Founder & CEO, CollPoll, “Students joining institutions and colleges right now have grown up with access to technology and expect universities to provide the fast, convenient responses they’ve grown used to around them. Unfortunately, most universities still use paper-based and manual processes that slow down administrators, educators, and students alike. To overcome this, universities are looking for automation to help them streamline processes and deliver slicker, smarter experiences at scale. Institutions are late to technology adoption but the pull is intense right now across all types and sizes of institutions. This is a huge opportunity for CollPoll to impact the 39 million plus students studying in Indian Higher Education institutions and empower the modern campuses as their long-term technology partner.”
Adds Amit Somani, Managing Partner, Prime Venture Partners, “India is going through a “Digitisation’ phase – every business, small or large, needs to digitise itself both to offer great customer experience to their users and to improve operations. Educational Institutions and colleges are no different. The better ones have realised they are serving the Gen Z customers who have grown up on the mobile internet and want a seamless and easy experience. Administrators also want the ability to manage their back office operations, the student population and all administrative functions through state of the art, modern software. CollPoll helps digitise campuses for educational institutions globally. CollPoll has a missionary founding team and Hemant is a passionate and inspirational leader who wants to help bring education institutes to the 21st century. We at Prime Venture are delighted to be a part of their journey.”
Abhishek Mohan Gupta, Pro Chancellor, Jagran Lakecity University corroborates, “CollPoll’s platform provides a great learning community for institutions like ours where students, faculty and staff can engage, collaborate and communicate more efficiently. To keep pace with the growing number of student admissions each year, we wanted to automate our administration, academic and learning processes and seamlessly manage critical functions such as conducting examinations, admission tests, fee payment, etc. CollPoll’s platform is an ideal solution that is easy-to use, simplifies faculty & student management and has helped us reduce administrative costs remarkably.”
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