Exclusive: Binny Bansal-backed 021 Capital leads Pre Series A round in Crio

Learning platform for developers, Crio, has secured Rs 7 crore in a pre-Series A funding round from Binny Bansal-backed 021 Capital. This is the second fundraise by the two-year-old startup. It had raised $1 million in a debt funding round led by Binny Bansal. 

Flipkart’s CTO Ravi G and CPO Mekin Maheshwari also joined the round along with the company's co-founder. The co-founders of B2B e-commerce unicorn Amod Malviya, Sujeet Kumar, and Vaibhav Gupta had also poured money in Crio’s through convertible notes. 

In its first institutional round, Crio has allotted 105,035 pre-Series A preference shares at an issue price of Rs 666.4 per share to 021 Capital for a total consideration of Rs 7 crore, shows regulatory filings. The round seems to be an ongoing one, and it’s likely to rake in more capital

Crio is a training platform that helps developers to learn new skills through experimental and applied learning. It uses work-life micro modules instead of passive video tutorials to make engineers industry-ready. At present, the company has three products including Crio DevSprint (8 weeks long), Crio Launch, and Crio Launch Plus (paid program) for students. 

Crio DevSprint and Crio Accelerate (20 weeks) cater to working professionals. 

According to Fintrackr’s estimation, the Bengaluru-based startup has been valued at around Rs 47 crore in this transaction. Post allotment, Ciro's co-founders, Sridher Jeyachandran and Rathinamurthy R’s respective stakes will dilute from 50% to 36.06% each whereas 021 Capital will acquire 15.15% stake in the Bengaluru based startup.   

Crio also has an ESOP Pool for employees which currently consists of 12.73% stake worth nearly Rs 6 crore. In its first 10 months of operations during FY19, the company generated operating revenue of Rs 29.22 lakhs through its training services. 

During the same period, its total expenditure stood at nearly Rs 49.8 lakhs, 80% of which was spent on staff salaries and payment to professional consultants. Losses for the period stood at Rs 20.4 Lakhs. It counts Flipkart, Goibibo, Capillary, Jio, Vogo, and CRED, among others, as its clients. 

In February, the company had launched a free product development program called ‘Crio Launch’ for engineering students. 

For future growth, Crio has plans to partner engineering colleges to source fresh graduates for its programs and make them industry-ready. It competes with a clutch of engineering-focused skilling firms including Pesto Tech, Bridgelabz, AttainU, and MountBlue among others.