This start-up has brought students, universities and banks together

The year 2023 saw a significant 35% jump in the number of Indian students going overseas for education with the total number pegged at a record 2.69 lakh, per data from The Open Doors 2023 report on International Educational Exchange.

Further, data from the Ministry of External Affairs shows that there were more than a lakh Indian students in each of the following four countries -- US, Canada, Australia and the UAE – at the end of 2022 with the total number of Indian students overseas pegged at 13.25 lakh.

This assumes significance as this clearly shows that there is a lot of demand for foreign universities among Indian students who also typically require funding for their overseas educational journey.

This is exactly the space where GradRight, an EdTech start-up, is operating and is seeing a healthy traction in terms of loan disbursements, university partnerships and student enquiries.

Founded by Aman Singh, who has spent a majority part of his working career in the education sector, the start-up aims to connect students with foreign universities and, at the same time, with lending institutions as well to secure the required funding.

“My journey has been mostly in the education sector and I gathered that students especially from the lower and middle section have a lot of problems finding the right college,” says Singh, Co-founder & CEO, GradRight.

“I also saw how banks were managing private education financing. But there were a lot of inefficiencies. For instance, it was easy to fund a student for IITs but what about those who got in Tier2/3 colleges. We felt there was a serious gap in financing solutions, challenges in marketing by universities and college selection and decision making for students themselves” he adds.

Thus, was born GradRight, which is essentially a platform that helps students shortlist the right college using data and technology, following which it helps universities to directly market themselves to the students that have been mapped to the universities and finally if the student and university are matched, then banks can offer loans on the go.

“So essentially, students select right, universities admit right and banks lend right. That is GradRight, in a nutshell, which has brought universities, students and banks on the same platform while also enabling them to transact with each other,” says Singh who has earlier been part of the team that founded Ashoka University.

And if the numbers are anything to go by then the platform is seeing a strong traction.

In the last two and a half years, nearly ₹2,000 crore worth of loans have been disbursed and, more importantly, 80% of the students were from Tier 2/3 towns.

Further, the platform currently has 26 university partners of which 25 are from the US and one from Canada and there are 16 partner lenders, including most of the leading banks.

Incidentally, in the last one and a half years, ₹18,000 crore worth of loan requests were received on the platform and even as the loan approval rate at a bank branch is pegged at around 40%, for GradRight, the average number was around 70% due to tools like machine learning and data intelligence.

“In 2022, 60,000 students applied for loans and around 2,000 loans were disbursed. The number rise to 3,000 in 2023,” says Singh who started a consulting company after moving on from Ashoka University, and helped set up four other universities and couple of colleges as well.

The start-up with a staff strength of around 210 currently only services Indian students planning to go for Masters in any of the six countries that most Indians go to.

In terms of revenue, the start-up has registered a 3x growth between 2021 and 2022. For 2023, the growth was pegged at 2x compared to the previous calendar year.

“We get a commission on bank loans. Secondly, universities that use our platform give us platform subscription and usage fee. We also have value added services like insurance, travel, accommodation, forex etc. But, 75% of our revenues come from bank commissions,” says Singh, while highlighting that the admission and loan disbursal processes are totally free for students.

The start-up also secured funding of ₹65 crore in September last year and now aims to grow between 3x and 4x.

Going ahead, it plans to launch its platform in the US this year and have a presence in the US, Canada, UK and Australia. Over the next 4-5 years, the platform aims to have partnerships with as many as 250-300 universities, says Singh.