Bengaluru-based startup Suphalaam, the owner of the popular online education marketplace, CAKART.in, received a boost in its arm after an angel group led by Serial entrepreneur Sunil Maheshwari and group invested an undisclosed sum in the company.
CAKART is an online education marketplace that sells online courses to commerce stream students preparing for various finance exams in India such as Chartered Accountancy (CA), Company Secretary (CS), Cost and Management Accountancy (CMA) and other related exams in the finance segment. Students can choose from a variety of courses and learn from a faculty at their own pace on any kind of device – desktop, tablet or phone. Suphalaam provides technology, training and support to teachers to create high quality courses.
The funding comes to help Suphalaam scale up CAKART to the next level, and allow the company to laterally grow in other big education markets.
Founders of Suphalaam include IITian Puru Mishra (CEO), NIT Gold Medalist Sunil Javaji (CTO), and Arun Kumar (COO). The founding members have earlier worked for leading tech companies in abroad and India and bring in a total of 30+ years of professional experience. In its earlier avatar, Suphalaam had indigenously built a national award winning mass education product – SmartBox - for students.
Suphalaam differentiations include a) Delivering the best marketplace experience to students by designing exclusive, virtually integrated marketplace that adapts as per the specific needs of a student b) Providing the most effective learning by making self paced learning the most rewarding experience c) Enabling peer learning and feedback and d) Maintaining technology leadership in the Ed-tech space by constantly building next generation tools that bring the best academic experience to students and teachers.
“CAKART has turned into the biggest player in CA online coaching today. Their popularity is quite high”, says CA Raj Agrawal, a popular CA faculty and author of 18 books in the field of CA, CS, CMA exam coaching.
In less than 18 months, CAKART has found a recommendable traction in the market. More than 50 faculty and organizations have listed 1000+ products. 1,80,000+ students are currently signed up with the sales growing 20 times in the span of the last 18 months. While majority of sales are from around 150+ cities in India, many sales are also from countries such as Nepal, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Bahrain.
“We had been bootstrapping so far. With the funding received we want to invest in scaling up the team and spending more on brand creation. This will also help us sustain our growth momentum until we raise more funds from an institutional investor”, said Puru Mishra noting that he is looking to raise USD 5 M to execute his short term plans.
“We see a very healthy business model. Along with a large user base, the company has successfully generated good revenue in a short time span. The team is as strong and committed as you can ask for. The target market is very large, considering that what they are doing for commerce stream can be replicated across multiple other education segments in the future”, said Sunil Maheshwari.
Around 3.5 million students opt for commerce education in India every year after completing their high school. The Total Annual Market for online tutoring is around USD 1 Billion. Competition in the finance education segment includes other online players such as Super Profs. But according to Puru, still the bulk of students can be found spending their money and time on offline classroom coaching classes for the lack of awareness. It is this market that CAKART is eyeing to disrupt by bringing much better learning products at half the cost.
About Suphalaam
Suphalaam makes India’s best education accessible anytime anywhere. It has built one of the largest education partner ecosystems in India. Its online education marketplace, CAKART.in, exclusively focuses on finance education and brings the largest number of high quality courses from faculty and organizations around the world. The company is located in Bangalore.
About Sunil Maheshwari & Group
Sunil has led Mango Technologies for many successful innovations in mobile space. Their products got acquired by Qualcomm, Inc., and received many awards in several categories, including most innovative company by NASSCOM, Top innovator nominee by GSMA. Sunil has been constantly rated as one of the top tech entrepreneurs in India. His group has also invested in companies like Atonarp, Inc and a few more that are in stealth mode. 
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