Mumbai: TalentSprint, a company creating high performance professionals for the IT and BFSI industry, has raised 20 crores in Series A equity funding from Nexus Venture Partners. As part of this Series A investment Anup Gupta will join the company’s board of directors. The company plans to integrate 100 colleges in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka into the TalentSprintCollege Network in the short term.

 Co-founded by industry veterans Madhumurty Ronanki, Santanu Paul, and J.A. Chowdary; TalentSprint aims to skill 500,000 graduates by 2020. TalentSprint, an NSDC partner company, offers employability programs to young professionals using experiential learning and iPEARL, its proprietary technology platform. The company works closely with industry partners to deliver productivity and efficiency gains in excess of 70 percent in terms of new talent acquisition. The company has successfully graduated 3,000 professionals that have been recruited by more than 60 leading companies in the IT and BFSI sector. TalentSprint has learning facilities in Hyderabad and Chennai and a strong College Partner Network.

Santanu Paul, CEO and Managing Director, TalentSprint said, “India has tripled the number of higher education seats since 2000 and will do so again between now and 2020. However, quality has become a massive challenge.  Our solution combines rich content, industry-experienced instructors and technology-aided delivery to provide meaningful employability outcomes. The near term goal is to integrate 100 colleges into the TalentSprint College Network.”

Prior to this, Paul served at Virtusa Corporation as Senior VP for Global Delivery Operations and Head of Indian Operations. Before this, he worked in Boston as CTO of OpenPages and Viveca, a B2B technology startup. He began his career in New York at the famed IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. He is a Distinguished Fellow of IDRBT, a Distinguished Fellow of the Skoch Development Foundation, VP of ITsAP, and a Director of TiE Hyderabad. Paul has also received a B.Tech from IIT Madras and a PhD. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Anup Gupta, Managing Director, Nexus Venture Partners, said, “Infusing quality into the higher education system is essential for India to be able to sustain its economic growth. We are very pleased to back TalentSprint’s strong management team and its innovative model that brings skill development and industry expertise to colleges and youth through smart use of technology. The goal is enable up-skilling on a large scale without compromising on quality.”

Nexus Venture Partners is a venture capital fund, with offices in India and Silicon Valley. It has $320m under management and an active portfolio of over 35 companies across technology, internet, media, consumer, business services sectors. The Nexus team plays an active role in helping entrepreneurs and management teams build market leading businesses.