Iron Pillar, Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal, others pump in $17.5 mn in Skill-Lync

Y Combinator-backed, engineering-focused edtech firm Skill-Lync raised $17.5 million from venture growth investor Iron Pillar, existing investors Y Combinator, Better Capital as well as new investors like Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal, co-founder of Xto10X Sai Krishnamurthy and founder of Sixteenth Street Capital Rashmi Kwatra. Iron Pillar invested $15 million.

The capital raised will be used to increase the number of courses offered by Skill-Lync, build a strong management team and expand the business to international markets.

“The ever-increasing gap between what industries expect and what students learn during their engineering education has caused a global shortage of high-quality engineering talent. The rapid adoption of new technologies by industries has also created a need for constant upskilling of engineering professionals. Hence, the need of the hour is to have engineers who have knowledge of both engineering fundamentals and how they can be applied to solve real world engineering problems through engineering design and simulation tools,” said co-founder and CEO Suryanarayanan P.

“Engineering education and upskilling outside of Computer Science have seen very little digital disruption over the last two decades. This, combined with the ever expanding need for real world interdisciplinary applications of engineering in today’s world creates a unique opportunity to establish a multi $ Billion global company with deep moats in this space,” said Anand Prasanna, Managing Partner, Iron Pillar.

Skill-Lync has collaborated with over 800 experts to create their current course content, said the statement. People with extensive experience offer a learning experience to students. The company said that it has the highest course completion rates in specialised course categories.

The edtech firm offers courses in Mechanical, Electrical, Civil and Computer Science Engineering domains as well as job-oriented courses in topics such as renewable energy, full-stack development, data analytics, embedded systems design, autonomous vehicle, electric vehicle design and more.

Also read: Byju's raises $350 million, becomes most-valued Indian startup
Also read: Unacademy raises $440 mn from Temasek, SoftBank, Tiger, others; valued at $3.4 bn