18th Feb 2015
AlmaConnect announces that it has raised a Pre-Series A round of funding from Mohandas Pai (Chairman, Manipal Global Education &ex-CFO Infosys) & Varun Aggarwal (Co-Founder, Aspiring Minds). The company is also supported by CIIE, IIM Ahmedabad & 91Springboard.
AlmaConnect is an alumni networking based social-network.
The key value being delivered by AlmaConnect is to help alums & students to leverage their trusted & powerful alumni networks for their full potential without depending upon their institutes / alumni associations who may/may not be do a great job.
There is tremendous latent value within an organization’s alumni group, and alums on AlmaConnect can discover the most relevant information and form the most meaningful professional relationships on the network. By translating real-world behavior and enabling smart recommendations, AlmaConnect is helping its users enhance the powerful relationships that are built amongst graduates and lets them continue to maintain and build upon these relationships over time.
Currently, over200 institutes are officially using the platform to connect with their alumni some of them being St. Stephen’s College Delhi, IIT Roorkee, IIM Indore, IIM Ranchi, IIM Udaipur, ISM Dhanbad, XISS, IRMA, Great Lakes, IRMA, DA-IICT.
Apart from colleges, alums can also initiate networks for their institutes as a free service and in total 2000+ such alumni networks are active on the platform. Institutions discover tremendous value of their networks, and find it easier to reach out to their alumni as well as maintain a comprehensive understanding of the successes of their graduates.
The startup will be utilizing this investment to scale its user growth from its current base of 250,000 to 1 million within 6 months, and prepare to raise a Series A round of funding in the future. The company is also looking to take the product global and has already got a few colleges from Singapore, Malaysia & Mauritius signed up on the network.
Some thoughts of the key people on the deal:
Pranav Pai, on behalf of Mohandas Pai (Chairman, Manipal Global Education), said: “The best institutions in the world – corporate and educational –put in a lot of effort to meaningfully engage with their alumni over time, and for good reason. A huge component of education and professional life comprises of the relationships and networks that one forms there and grows over time. AlmaConnect is delivering a unique value proposition that helps both alumni and institutions maintain and enhance these relationships. With their fundamentally sound understanding of how these networks work, the AlmaConnect team has been able to rollout a product that is engaging, highly retentive, and built toinherentlyevolve in value as it grows. That is the mark of a product that truly understands its users, and we are happy to join the team on their journey to scale this powerful network globally.”
Varun Aggarwal (Co-Founder, Aspiring Minds) said: “As an alumnus of MIT, I have seen the power of alumni networks in both my personal and professional life. There is a huge demand for a simple cloud-based solution for an alumni service among institutions and individuals. In my scan, Almaconnect has globally the most sophisticated product to address this need.“
Swapnil Khandelwal (CEO &Co-Founder, AlmaConnect) said: “We are extremely happy with the investors we are getting on board. Mr. Mohandas Pai is Chairman of Manipal Global, one of the biggest educational group in India and Varun, Co-Founder of the most successful company in the higher education market of India. We are moving forward to our goal of 1 million active users quite fast and their advice will be of great help.“
Rubish Gupta (CTO &Co-Founder, AlmaConnect) said: “We have been successful in engaging alumni networks of premium institutes and have been opening up the platform to all colleges in india. We are also planning to expand to more geographies with US being the primary target. AlmaConnect is all set to transition to the next growth phase.“
More About AlmaConnect:
About the founders:
AlmaConnect was founded by Swapnil Khandelwal & Rubish Gupta, both 2009 graduates from DA-IICT (Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information & Communication Technology). Before AlmaConnect, Swapnil was running a startup in the online tutoring space & Rubish was working as web technology evangelist in a startup.
Some Key pointers & features:
- A sample of key clients: St. Stephen’s College Delhi, IIT Roorkee, IIM Indore, IIM Ranchi, IIM Udaipur, ISM Dhanbad, XISS, IRMA, Great Lakes, IRMA, DA-IICT.
- Automatically fetches news related to alumni to help discover the key alums and get connected to them
- Aggregates job openings in companies where alumni work and facilitate referrals amongst them.
- Helps in getting trusted help from alums for careers right from higher education to jobs to entrepreneurship.