Prosus Ventures, the corporate venturing arm of media and e-commerce group Naspers, co-led a $113m series D round for India-based online education provider Eruditus yesterday.
The round was led by growth equity firm Leeds Illuminate and also featured Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Sequoia India and Ved Capital. It valued the company at more than $700m post-money, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.
Eruditus provides professional and business education courses to an adult student base in partnership with universities across the world, also offering online courses through subsidiary Emeritus.
The company’s partnerships have been forged with more than 30 institutions including MIT, University of Cambridge, Columbia University, Harvard University and University of California, Berkeley.
The funding will support an expansion in career-ready courses offered by Eruditus in addition to increasing its reach in emerging markets. Avendus Capital was financial adviser for the series D round, which boosted the company’s overall funding to more than $160m.
Ashutosh Sharma, Prosus Ventures’ head of investments for India, said: “Education technology is a major focus for Prosus Ventures, and we now have six edtech portfolio companies spanning education across K-12, vocational upskilling, lifelong learning and now higher education with the inclusion of Eruditus.
“Eruditus’s goals are a great match for ours – democratising access of quality resources for a much broader audience. The value of the teachings of the great institutions has been rationed to those who can physically and monetarily access their facilities.”
Sequoia Capital India led a $40m series C round for Emeritus in January 2019 featuring Bertelsmann India Investments, a corporate venturing vehicle for media group Bertelsmann that had previously supplied $8.2m for the company in a 2017 series B round. Ved Capital was also named as an existing investor.
