Y Combinator-backed Skill-Lync raises $17.5 Mn in Series A led by Iron Pillar

Engineering focused edtech startup Skill-Lync has raised $17.5 million in its Series A funding round led by Iron Pillar. Existing investors Y Combinator and Better Capital also participated in this funding round along with angels including Binny Bansal, Sai Krishnamurthy and Rashmi Kwatra.

With this round, Skill-Lync has raised a total of $20 million across Seed and Series A funding rounds. The company also claimed that it’s the largest Series A funding received by an Indian edtech startup in 2021.

The proceeds will be utilised for building an alternate platform for engineering education with job-leading interdisciplinary courses and for expanding into new geographies, said the company in a press release.

The three-year-old startup launched by Suryanarayanan P and Sarangarajan V was one of the early edtech platforms in India to offer autonomous engineering courses. It provides job leading industry-relevant courses in the mechanical, electrical, civil and computer science engineering domains for students in India and abroad.

According to Skill-Lync, it addresses the lack of quality and application-based learning in the Indian undergraduate engineering education system and the platform has the highest course completion rates in these course categories.

The startup remained a bootstrapped company until the seed money from Y Combinator. The pricing for its courses is between Rs 10,000 for introductory courses and Rs 2.45 lakh for an eight-month Master's program.

Skill-Lync claims to have collaborated with over 800 industry experts for creating their existing course content and has full-time people with experience with the likes of Bosch, Cummins, ABB, Samsung and Accenture to provide the students with a better learning experience.

AttainU and Ekeeda are some of the top alternatives to Skill-Lync in India in autonomous engineering courses.

According to Fintrackr’s research, Indian edtech startups have raised close to $2.3 billion in 2021. Byju’s leads the chart with over $1.5 billion followed by Unacademy’s $440 million. The list also includes UpGrad, Classplus and Teachmint.