FrontRow lands $14 million in funding led by Eight Roads Ventures, GSV : Tech News

FrontRow, a learning platform for non-academic skills, has raised $14 million as part of its Series A funding round led by Eight Roads Ventures and GSV.

The company plans to use the money to scale up to more than 10 categories and over 300 courses over the next year, it said in a statement.

Existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and Elevation Capital also participated in the funding round, along with angel investors such as Vishal Dadlani, Raftaar, Kunal Shah, Gaurav Munjal and Farid Ahsan.

The company earlier
raised $3.2 million in a seed round led by Lightspeed, Elevation and Ka Enterprises, Deepika Padukone’s family office.

Founded in 2020 by Shubhadit Sharma, Mikhil Raj and Ishaan Preet Singh, FrontRow offers skill-based paid courses in genres such as cricket, music and comedy. These courses are taught by celebrities and online influencers.

“We will be investing heavily on team and product,” Singh said. “The next decade will see new paradigms of learning, built online first, and better than offline! For this, we’re building a new model of community and cohort-led learning that is a fundamental evolution of ed-tech.”

The company said it has more than 50,000 paid learners across more than 2,000 cities worldwide. Its users spend over a million hours learning on FrontRow.

“More than 70% of learning is actually outside the classroom and that’s the part that hasn’t been solved yet,” Raj said.

Celebrities such as Amit Trivedi, Neha Kakkar, and Suresh Raina take courses for aspirants.

“As investors, we’ve been a big champion of the role technology will play in disrupting multiple sectors, including education. We believe the market is highly under-served with strong secular trends in digital adoption of non-academic learning driven by limited availability of qualified instructors, flexibility in scheduling and lack of access to structured curriculum,” said Aditya Systla, Partner, Eight Roads Ventures.

Following US-based MasterClass, which also offers celebrity-taught lessons, FrontRow competes with the likes of Unlu, Mento, Celebrity School and others.