Digital education portal TopRankers on September 8 announced that it has raised Rs 4.5 crore from Careernet Consulting and Ideation Initiative Pvt. Ltd.

The company will use the funds for improving technology and geographic expansion in India.

Founded by Gaurav Goel, Malay Sarkar, Mehbub Hussain, Harish Goswami and Himanshu Joshi in 2014, TopRankers is an online preparation portal for competitive exams that provides study material and practice tests.

The company operates on a business-to-business (B2B) model with education institutions, as well as business-to-consumer (B2C) segment, catering to students.

In its B2B segment, the company offers software as a service (SaaS) product to educational institutions called TopRankers Edge, which allows these institutions to upload their content and study modules online.

“The portal currently has more than 50,000 users registered, Additionally, the all-India mock test prepared by TopRankers gives students a rough idea about the different formats and types of questions asked on such competitive exams, and help them analyse their weaknesses, giving them ample time to prepare for the main exams,” the company said in a statement.

TopRankers is based in Bengaluru and has offices in Bhopal and Delhi, with a team of 40 people, besides 60 freelancers, the company said in a statement.

Currently, TopRankers is working with more than 35 institutes across 10 Indian cities. The start-up plans to engage more than 150 education institutes in the next few months across more than 50 cities, the company said in a statement. Additionally, TopRankers aims to add 500,000 students on its platform in the next 12-18 months.

“It has been estimated that around 1.8 crore students takes these (competitive) exams every year. With the international online learning market expected to reach $107 billion by the end of this financial year, there are numerous players that have already started filling in the gaps,” said Mohit Gupta, Managing Director, Ideation Initiative.

According to Tracxn, a start-up tracker, as many as 271 online education start-ups were founded in 2014, which increased marginally to 293 in 2015. In 2014, about $28 million was invested in the sector across 32 deals, shows Tracxn data. In 2015, 47 deals worth $74.7 million were struck.

Source: Mint