GrayQuest, a startup that collaborates with educational establishments to break up fees into equated monthly installments, said that it had increased Rs 56 crore (about $7 million) in its Series A funding round.

The round was led by Pravega Ventures, with participation from family investors such as Weizmann Group, Telama Family Office and Apurva Parekh from the Pidilite Family Office, it said in a statement.

Other investors that participated included Kunal Shah, founder of Cred; Anupam Mittal, founder, of Shaadi.com; Sujeet Kumar, founder, Udaan, among others.

Returning investors included family offices of Ashok Wadhwa, founder, of Ambit Capital and Mahansaria Tyres managing director Yogesh Mahansaria.

With a team of 200 employees based across Mumbai and Bengaluru, GrayQuest has started managing fee payments for its partner institutes since last year.

Some of its clients include Podar International School, Ryan Group of Institutions, Vibgyor group of Schools, Delhi Public School, Narayana Group of Schools, BITS Pilani, Sharda University, Shiv Nadar University and Amity University. It is currently also onboarding digitally native edtech companies such as UpGrad.

Aiming to start operating in the education loans space, GrayQuest intends to use the fresh capital to enhance its product offerings and scale up distribution across the education ecosystem, founder and CEO Rishab Mehta.

While it operates pan-India, about 60% of GrayQuest’s revenue currently comes from the West and South of the country. Mehta added that the company’s revenue grew about 4X in 2021 and 3X in 2022 and intends to grow by 3X in 2023, declining to share specific numbers.

Founded by Mehta in 2017 and bootstrapped till 2020, GrayQuest offers educational institutions a unified payments platform to enable them to digitize and boost fee collection.

It has partnered with over 5,000 schools, universities and coaching centers that serve about three million students across the country.

“Our data, across multiple cohorts, indicates Indian families consistently spend over 20% of their annual household income on their children’s education fees (across schools and higher education). Our range of payment and technology solutions have demonstrated tremendous positive results for both parents and educational institutions relating to education fee payments,” Mehta said.

India’s education ecosystem is one of the world’s largest with about $100 billion of education fees paid annually, said Vinay Menon, co-founder, Pravega Ventures. “However, we found it to be surprisingly underserved in terms of the payment solutions available for the ecosystem.”

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