IAN Leads Rs. 3.85 crores investment in Cloud Certification and Skilling platform QwikSkills
New Delhi: QwikSkills, a one-stop destination for tech professionals and students, has raised a seed funding of INR 3.85 crore round led by Indian Angel Network (IAN), along with other investors. The round was led by angel investors Manish Sinha and Naveen Gupta of IAN.
The Gurugram-based startup, founded in 2020, aims to utilize the freshly raised funds for strategizing and acquiring the B2B2C segment with corporates, different educational institutes, universities, and colleges, along with a vision of expanding in India and the global markets of Europe, the US, Asia-Pacific, and South-East Asia.
It plans to use the investment funds to enhance its workforce and hire a team of cloud experts, developers, sales & marketing teams for B2B & corporate sales, and a vision of acquiring a major percentage of B2B markets.
A brainchild of Varun Mahajan and Harit Verma, QwikSkills drew its inspiration from the struggle faced by the founders in finding an intelligent test platform to prepare candidates for the exams. It propelled the idea of designing a platform that could help the tech professional in learning cloud-based technologies and skills. The platform has achieved a milestone of helping the 11,000 plus users grow their tech skills with cloud-based technologies quickly and keeps a goal of reaching 50000 users along with major B2B associations.
QwikSkills is a subscription-based practice platform offering monthly and annual packages for users to practice cloud computing and meet the tech industry’s challenges. Also, bridging the technical skills gap, QwikSkills offers customized practice solutions for students and tech professionals to get hands-on cloud skills and grow their overall technical skills.
Speaking about the funding, Varun Mahajan, Co-Founder of QwikSkills, said, “With this investment, we are looking to enhance our current offerings and expand into enterprise & B2B corporate model. We currently have hands-on cloud labs for AWS, Azure, and GCP. Moving forward, we’ll be expanding our offerings into VMWare, Salesforce, Alibaba, Huawei, IBM, and OpenStack for hands-on skilling.”
Manish Sinha, Lead Investor at IAN, said: “QwikSkills fills a big void in the Enterprises by providing current and future employees with hands-on practical cloud experience and certifications, thus preparing them for a bright future on the cloud. The QwikSkills platform is also building a global community of professionals who can learn from each other and help each other. Enterprises will be able to harness the power of the community of experts for developing cloud-native business platforms.”
QwikSkills’ goal is to achieve the idea of democratizing knowledge and making cloud skilling and practice accessible and affordable for everyone. The company is striving to make a change in the industry and is emerging as a primary choice for students and tech employees to learn and practice tests for cloud and other tech certification exams.
About Indian Angel Network:
Indian Angel Network is India’s first and world’s largest business angel network with close to 500 members across the world, comprising the who’s who of successful entrepreneurs and dynamic CEOs. With investors from 12 countries, IAN’s presence spans 7 locations, which includes cities in India and the UK. The network is sector agnostic and has funded start-ups across 19 sectors in India and 7 other countries growing global footprint companies. With an excellent track record, IAN has been giving excellent cash exits year-on-year to its investor members, for the last 12 years. Some of its marquee investee companies include Druva, Spinny, Box8, Uniphore, WOW Momos, Consure, Fareye, NOCCARC, Propelld, Skit.ai amongst many others.
IAN has also launched the IAN Fund, an INR 375 crore fund, which is a uniquely differentiated seed/early stage Fund that aims to transform India’s entrepreneurial landscape. The fund invests in innovative companies in sectors including healthcare and medical devices, VR, AI, software as a service, marketplaces, fin-tech, big data, artificial intelligence, agritech, and hardware.
With this, IAN has created the single largest platform for seed and early-stage investing, enabling entrepreneurs to raise from Rs. 25 lakhs to Rs. 50 crores.