New Delhi: Edtech platform Toprankers has acquired career guidance platform ProBano in a cash-and stock-deal, marking its entry into the career discovery and guidance category. The terms of the current transaction, including the deal size, were not disclosed.
However, Gaurav Goel, Co-founder and CEO of Toprankers said that it is a large deal for the edtech platform. With this acquisition, Toprankers becomes a full-stack career platform—from helping students discover a career to getting their first job. The edtech platform has renamed ProBano and added it under its umbrella as a career discovery brand—Toprankers Udaan.
ProBano, a New Delhi-based career guidance platform for high school students, facilitates students to make informed career choices and develop the necessary skills to achieve their career goals. The acquisition, which comes as a strategic move for Toprankers, enables it to design a ‘Career Discovery and Experience’ platform that will enable high school students to explore their passions and offer skill-building opportunities across diverse career domains. “Leveraging ProBano’s expertise in career guidance and counselling, we will help… high school students explore different career options, discover their passion, and pursue it,” Goel, said.
Toprankers will integrate ProBano’s CEO Aditya Bose and his team of career guides and project managers into its existing team. Bose will now serve as Product Owner – Career Discovery and Experience at Toprankers.
“Joining forces with Toprankers enables us to do it (help students) at a large scale by leveraging its strong student network, its expertise in edtech, and its range of offerings for students who have chosen a specific career option,” Bose noted.
Toprankers focuses on the Indian K-12 market beyond engineering and medicine entrance exams. It offers learning approaches and support to students preparing for management, CUET (Common Universities Entrance Test), law, judiciary, and design and architecture entrances. Toprankers’ vision for the future Now, the edtech platform will also offer career guidance and counselling, with its one-to-one counselling product slated to launch in the first week of June, according to Goel.
The product, priced in the range of Rs 30,000-50,000, would offer a personalised experience to a student over 4-6 months, helping them discover and experience different career options, he noted. For the edtech platform, career discovery and experience now becomes the first step, followed by test preparation to help students get into colleges, Goel said. Subsequently, students can opt for products to pursue higher education or to get a job, he added.
Like many other edtech firms, Toprankers too is looking to expand its footprint in the offline space. From about 4-5 centres in June last year, it has nearly 15 offline centres now, with another 10 opening in the next five months, as per Goel. He said that the company plans to have about a total of 50 offline centres, including 10 franchised ones, by the end of FY24. Toprankers’ presence so far has been limited to North Indian states like Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Rajasthan. However, it plans to expand into South India, to states like Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh, with about 8-10 new centres expected to open in this region in FY24, according to Goel.
“We are trying to see if we can get to new cities, and partner with the existing coaching institutes,” Goel said. “Rather than starting from zero, we will just acquire an institute and rebrand it as Toprankers,” he added. The edtech platform may think about expanding outside India as well after FY24 to offer its career discovery and skilling products, Goel noted.
With the acquisition of ProBano, the company’s team will grow to more than 400 people, and in the next one year, its workforce will expand by about 50% as it plans to hire across verticals. Talking about fundraising, Goel noted that Toprankers is sufficiently capitalised. Last June, the startup raised $4 million in a Series A round from Sixth Sense Ventures. It has raised a total funding of $4.67 million over two funding rounds. Goel also stated Toprankers touched revenue numbers in the range of Rs 40-50 crore in FY23 and aims to nearly double its revenue between Rs 85-100 crore in the next financial year. It hopes to have ~75,000 paid students this year from ~30,000 last year.
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