Bengaluru: India’s first social learning platform, Bluelearn,has announced the funding of $3.5 Million in a seed round led by Elevation Capital and Lightspeed. The round also saw participation from Titan Capital, 2am VC, along with angel investors Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal (founders of Meesho), Awais Ahmed (Founder of Pixxel), Vivek Mohan (Private equity), and others. This is in addition to the previous rounds led by Lightspeed and 100x VC.
The company was founded in 2021 by Harish Uthayakumar and Shreyans Sancheti while they were studying at BITS Pilani, Goa. Bluelearn started off as a telegram channel for students to help each other with common questions and today their app has over 150,000 members from over 5,500 colleges and startups across 20+ countries and is growing 30% month on month organically.
Bluelearn has also recently launched their internship and freelancing platform, Bluelearn Work – which matches the top 2% of community members with companies looking to hire exceptional young talent quickly. In under 2 months, BL Work has seen more than 1100+ companies and individuals post gigs and internships and more than 30k total applications.
Commenting on the fundraise, Shreyans Sancheti, Co-founder, Bluelearn said, “People are at the core of everything we do, from our team to the entire community. With the new capital we plan on accelerating our market expansion to newer and previously untapped markets in India and globally. By strengthening our core tech and product teams we will continue building impactful products that help people grow in their careers and lives.
Harish Uthayakumar, Co-founder, Bluelearn added “Over our journey, we have witnessed that a lot of our community members have started companies together, started freelancing, found internships, made life-long friendships, and met mentors all on Bluelearn. The company is enabling previously unimaginable possibilities, and with this fresh round of funds, we will continue to grow”.
Most students and early working professionals don’t get the opportunity to explore interests beyond the academic curriculum or develop other aspects of their personality and soft skills in the current framework. Bluelearn helps in bridging this gap by providing holistic learning opportunities through the power of community. They host large scale events like AMAs with top entrepreneurs, gaming tournaments, music concerts, hackathons and have created micro niche communities such as the finance club, coding club, and 20+ more.
Amit Aggarwal, Principal at Elevation Capital said, “We are firm believers that the future of learning will be social, as learners are actively engaged and it’s just more fun in a collaborative setup. Bluelearn is uniquely building both a social network and a learning destination by bringing together communities of young learners, anchored around shared interest areas. We envision that Bluelearn will be the social learning destination for networking, upskilling and discovering the first employment opportunity for Gen Z.”
Rohil Bagga, Investor at Lightspeed said, “At Lightspeed, we believe that the future of learning is social & community-based and have been fortunate to partner with Bluelearn from day one. Over the last couple of years, the platform has grown to become one of India’s largest digital communities of students, presenting its members with unique opportunities to learn new skills, connect with like minded folks and participate in the formal workforce via gigs & internships. We feel excited to continue supporting the incredible team at Bluelearn in their mission to redefine the digital learning landscape!”
Bluelearn plans to use the funds to further strengthen the product and team as well as to grow their community user base by 10x within the year. The brand is actively hiring across functions such as product, tech, marketing, and operations and plans to almost double the team size by the end of the year.
