WestBridge Capital leads $28 mn Series B funding in Sunstone Eduversity

Mid-market private equity firm WestBridge Capital has led a $28 million Series B funding round in Sunstone Eduversity, a Gurugram-based startup offering higher education programmes.   Returning investors in the round include Saama Capital and Alteria Capital. Work10m, a fund floated by PeopleStrong's Group CEO Pankaj Bansal, also participated in the round.   “The current funding is an endorsement to Sunstone’s unique model of working with reputed colleges and corporates and using technology to bring quality education to millions of students. We are thankful to our partners and investors who believed in our vision and with this investment we want to scale the offering across the country,” Ashish Munjal, co-founder, Sunstone Eduversity, said in a statement.   The company said it will use the fresh capital to further strengthen its learning and technology assets besides investing on expanding its network of colleges and hiring talents.   Launched by IMT-Ghaziabad alumnus Munjal and Piyush Nangru, Sunstone partners with colleges and private universities to offer hybrid learning programs for both postgraduate and undergraduate students. It specially focuses on sectors and topics such as BFSI, business analytics, logistics, sales management, retail, digital marketing.   The company, in partnership with various universities, has added three new programs this year - BBA, MCA, and online MBA and plans to introduce undergraduate programs such as BCA, B.Com and BSc in the next 12 months. Sunstone claimed that it will be enrolling over 25,000 students across 35 cities by the end of 2022.   “Sunstone’s higher education programs have the potential to bring in the much awaited transformation in the Indian education system where students will now have access to a high quality education product in all corners of the country. We are excited by Sunstone's growth and the innovation in technology and learning systems so far and look forward to the next phase of growth,” Sandeep Singhal, managing director, WestBridge Capital, said.   The investment underlines investor appetite on the horizontal growth opportunities in Indian edtech space beyond K12, exam prep and reskilling.   Mumbai-based online executive education platform Eruditus recently raised $650 million in its latest round of funding, led by Accel Partners and SoftBank Vision Fund II, at a valuation of $3.2 billion. The ten-year-old startup's valuation has quadrupled from about $700 million last year. Eruditus works with top international universities and offers more than 100 executive-level courses to students spread across 80 nations. Some of the top institutes that Eruditus is working with are MIT, Harvard, Columbia, Cambridge, INSEAD, Wharton, UC Berkeley, IITs, IIMs and NUS.