Decoding Simplilearn’s Series E round

Edtech startup Simplilearn recently announced its $45 million Series E led by GSV Ventures with participation from Clal Insurance, and DisruptAD, ADQ’s venture platform. While the company did not disclose details of the new investment, Fintrackr has sifted through the company’s regulatory filings to decode round-break-up, cap table, and valuation.

The board at Simplilearn has passed a special resolution to issue 36,447 Series E compulsory convertible preference shares (CCPS) at an issue price of Rs 1,02,013 per share to raise Rs 371.81 crore or $45.6 million, the company’s regulatory filing with the Registrar of Companies (RoC) shows.

As per Fintrackr’s estimates, the company has been valued at around Rs 4,950 crore or $610 million (post-money).

GSV Ventures has spearheaded the funding round and infused Rs 330.5 crore ($40.5 million) to acquire 6.70% shares of the company. ADQ (Abu Dhabi Developmental) via Beta Oryx Limited invested the remaining sum of Rs 41.32 crore ($5.1 million) and captured 0.84% of the cap table.  It’s worth mentioning that Clal Insurance and DisruptAD are limited partners (LPs) of GSV Ventures.

BCP Topco XI Pte Ltd, a private equity firm linked to Blackstone Inc. remains the largest stakeholder with 61.41% stake. In August 2021, Blackstone put in $250 million (Series D, secondary) in Simplilearn. Before that, it was valued at $80 million during Series C round in 2016.

Promoters of Simplilearn Krishna Kumar and Archana Kumari collectively hold 14.43% stake. The company also has an ESOP Pool of 15.90%.

Twelve-year-old Simplilearn is a digital upskilling platform that provides training in cyber security, cloud computing, project management, digital marketing, and data science, among others. The bootcamps are co-created with universities MIT and Caltech and leading industry partners like IBM, Microsoft Azure, Meta,  Amazon, and KPMG via live online classes.

The Bengaluru and San Francisco-based company claims that it has seen significant growth in the past year and has added more than 1,20,000 paid B2C learners, and over 1,00,000 enterprise learners on its platform. 

Simplilearn’s revenue from operations grew over 40% to Rs 479.7 crore during FY22 as compared to Rs 341 crore in FY21. As per the annual financial statement with the RoC, its losses shot up 26X to nearly Rs 150 crore in FY22 from Rs 5.65 crore in the preceding fiscal year (FY21).

On Monday, Simplilearn announced that it has acquired Fullstack Academy, a US-based bootcamp education company for an all-cash transaction. This is the company’s second acquisition after Market Motive in 2015. 

As per Simplilearn, the acquisition will enhance its scale and drive revenue growth to $200 million (Rs 1,600 crore) by FY24, of which 70 percent is likely to come from global markets. It also aims to achieve profitability by March 2024. The company competes with Newton School, Masai School, and to some extent with Scaler by InterviewBit.