Online Learning Startup Vlurn Raises Seed Funding from Accord Group, MD & CEO, Vidyadhar Sarfare

Vlurn.com, a platform for online courses has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Vidyadhar Sarfare, MD & CEO of Accord Group. In a statement issued by Vlurn, which currently provides around 50 different online courses in six verticals, the funds raised will be used to hire talent to boost technical team and for development of its mobile app , creating studio infrastructure and marketing and promotion of the courses. Vlurn currently has about 2000 registered users who have undertaken more than 5000 hours of training in various courses.

Speaking on the funding received, Mithil Pawar, co-founder of the learning portal said, "Vlurn wants to become a go-to place, for anyone who wants to learn from the best trainers in India. It is not a marketplace for buying and selling of courses but it is an integrated platform where learners search and choose courses based on their requirements and then undertake them in a collaborative manner with fellow learners."

Having worked for companies like Morgan Stanley, Edelweiss, IDFC, Citi, in the past, the founders of Vlurn quit their jobs to start a financial skills training company, Academy of Financial Training, in 2010 to answer their penchant for training. In this institute, they provided niche and advanced financial trainings to some of the best companies in India. During this phase, they realized that there is huge demand for online video based training programs evident by repeated requests to create such programs, from their clients.

Vidyadhar Sarafare, MD & CEO, Accord Group, which has background in IT and healthcare business in Pune added, "We feel that there are a lot of competitive niches in the overall learning market and we backed Vlurn to focus on offering video based training of some top notch trainers in India. This is a very large target market with multiple streams and online trainings are at an unprecedented inflection point, given the rapid rise in internet penetration and mobile phone usage."

India, which is the 2nd largest market for online learning after the US, will face a potential shortage of 250 million skilled workers by 2022. India's online education market size is predicted to grow to $40 billion by 2017 from the present $20 billion. More than half of the country's 1 billion population falls in the target market for education and related services and has the highest growth rate in the world in self-paced e-learning. India is also expecting a boost from the government's budget of Rs 1.13 trillion set aside for the Digital India initiative, says a recent report by the UK-India Business Council. The country has more than 1.4 million schools with over 227 million students enrolled and more than 36,000 higher education institutes and has one of the largest higher education systems in the world. As of now the Indian education market is worth approximately, US$ 100 billion out of which, higher education contributes 59.7 % of the market size, school education 38.1 %, pre-school segment 1.6 %, and technology and multi-media the remaining 0.6 %.

Source : Equity Bulls

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