Indian edtech startup CollegeDekho, which helps students connect with prospective colleges and keep track of exams, has raised $8 million in Series B round.
The new financing round for the four-year-old Gurgaon-based startup was led by its parent company Girnarsoft Education and London-based private equity investor Man Capital, which also participated in the startup’s Series A round last year.
Ruchir Arora, founder and CEO of CollegeDekho told TechCrunch in an interview that the startup will use the capital to expand its presence in more schools and also begin connecting students with international educational institutions. The startup, which has raised $13 million to date, will also ramp up its research and development efforts.
CollegeDekho, hindi for search for college, maintains a website that helps students identify the right career choices for them. The website has a chatbot that answers some of the questions students have while logging their responses and other website activities such as the kind of colleges they are searching for on the platform, their preferred location and budget.
Arora said the startup, which also has about 3,000 call centre representatives and counsellors, builds profiles of students to make college recommendations. He said each month the site observes more than five million sessions from students. Last year, more than 8,000 students used CollegeDekho to take admission in a college.
Parents in India, a country of 1.3 billion people with not the best literacy record, see education as an upward mobility for their children. Each year, more than six to seven million students go to a college. But because of a range of factors that can include cultural stigma, many students end up choosing wrong path and thus don’t excel in college. Indeed, many students ultimately don’t pursue the subject they are best suited for, Arora said, and that’s where CollegeDekho aims to make an impact.
Most high school students in India often gravitate toward engineering or medical college, as a result of which, each year India produces many engineers and doctors who struggle for years to find a job. Arora said his startup looks at more than 2,000 career paths a student could pursue.
What works in favor of Arora is that the country will continue to turn out millions of students each year who will be looking to go to a college soon. It also helps that CollegeDekho is operationally profitable, Arora said, adding that it generates about $3.2 million in revenue in a year. Any additional cash that the startup raises will go into its expansion, he said.
CollegeDekho charges a nominal fee from students, and also takes a cut when they join a college. More than 36,000 educational institutes are listed on CollegeDekho. The startup also works with more than 400 colleges to conduct an exam for direct admission, and there too it earns a cut.
India’s education market, estimated to be grow to $5.7 billion by next year, has emerged as a lucrative opportunity for startups and VCs alike. Bangalore-based Byju’s, which helps millions of students in India prepare for competitive exams, raised $540 million from Naspers and others late last year. Unacademy, which like Byju’s offers online tutoring to students, has raised more than $38.5 million to date.
A legion of other education startups today are vying for the attention of students in the nation. Noida-based AskIITians, not much far from the offices of CollegeDekho, aims to help school-going students prepare for medical and engineering exams. Extramarks, also based in Noida, operates in the same space as AskIITians. Reliance Industries, owned and controlled by India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani, bought 38.5 percent stake in the startup three years ago.
Source: TechCrunch
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It’s a key victory for tenants who didn’t want smart locks and apps tracking their activities.
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[Update: Changpeng Zhao’s comments on Periscope added to bottom of post]
Cryptocurrency exchange Binance has confirmed a “large scale” data breach, in which hackers stole more than $40 million in cryptocurrency
In a statement, the company said hackers stole API keys, two-factor codes and other information in the attack.
Binance traced the cryptocurrency theft — more than 7,000 bitcoins at the time of writing — to a single wallet after the hackers stole the contents of the company’s bitcoin hot wallet. Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume, said the theft impacted about 2 percent of its total bitcoin holdings.
“All of our other wallets are secure and unharmed,” said the statement.
“The hackers had the patience to wait, and execute well-orchestrated actions through multiple seemingly independent accounts at the most opportune time,” the statement read. “The transaction is structured in a way that passed our existing security checks. It was unfortunate that we were not able to block this withdrawal before it was executed.”
“Once executed, the withdrawal triggered various alarms in our system. We stopped all withdrawals immediately after that,” the statement said.
Binance said its secure asset fund for users (SAFU) will cover user losses.
Until the company’s investigation is complete, deposits and withdrawals will remain suspended but trading will remain open.
Binance chief executive Changpeng Zhao is set to hold a Twitter ask-me-anything session in the coming hours. TechCrunch will bring you more once we have it.
Update:
On Periscope, Zhao gave more details about the hack, saying that it was a very advanced effort executed by “very patient” hackers who waited until they had a number of high net worth accounts. He added that Binance will be able to cover the bitcoin lost without help. The company does not know yet exactly how many users were affected.
The company is currently working with other exchanges to block deposits from hacked addresses. It will be about a week before Binance can release withdrawals or accept deposits again because it needs to “make sure we completely eradicate any trace of hackers in all our accounts and data and that is a pretty tedious process,” Chao said. He encouraged everyone to change their API keys and two-factor authentication.
In response to questions about potentially issuing a rollback, Chao said “to be honest we can do that probably within the next few days but there are concerns that if we were to do a rollback on the bitcoin network on that scale, it may have some negative consequences in terms of destroying credibility for bitcoin, so our team is still deciding on that and running through the numbers and checking everything. We will try to maintain very high transparency. He added that the idea came from the bitcoin community. “I actually did not know we could do that, but there are serious consequences for doing that, so we will take that very cautiously.”
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Microsoft’s new Chromium-based Edge is shaping up best for enterprise users, but that doesn’t mean it offers nothing at all for the consumer. But what’s clear is that right now, nobody really knows.
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Source: Digital trends
Google announced today it has launched a new page transition experience for the Chrome web browser called “Portals.” The technology is something the company has been developing for some time, and is designed to offer an alternative to using IFrames. In fact, the company described Portals as being more like “IFrames that you can navigate” — because, unlike a traditional IFrame, which gives a window into another website, a Portal actually lets you go through to that other website.
In a demo of Portals’ potential, Google showed off how they could be used on a meal planning website. The example site they used aggregated recipes from other sites around the web. Normally, you’d have to click through to the destination website in order to see the recipe’s details, like the cooking steps, ingredients, and other information. With Portals, however, you could browse the various recipes on the main meal planning website – then, when you found a recipe you wanted to save, you could launch it in a Portal. For example, you could click the main website’s “Share” button which would load the destination website in this pop-up like view of the destination webpage. You could then save the recipe directly to your favorite pinboard or social network.
In the demo, the recipe was being saved to a fake social network called “Nom Nom.” When the user clicked “Share,” Nom Nom’s domain actually opened within the portal, while the original meal planning website persisted in the background, ready for you to return.
This works because a function in Portals allows the origin page to share context with the destination. In other words, it really is like a “portal” to another site, not a view of it.
When the recipe was saved and shared, the user could then close the Portal to return to the original meal planning site and continue to browse for more recipes.
Another function in portals is the ability for the origin site to hand off information to a destination site.
To continue the recipe example, when the user found a recipe they wanted to cook they were able to hand off the ingredients list from recipe site to an online grocery service’s website through the Portal. And while the destination site loads, the Portal can display an animation to offer a more pleasant transition experience for the end user.
Google said it has now launched the Portals API as an experimental feature behind a flag in Canary (#enable-portals), and is looking for developer community feedback.
Source: TechCrunch