Career Launcher India Ltd., a Delhi-based education service provider, has invested $1 million (Rs 4.5 crore) in 361 Degree Minds Consulting Pvt Ltd., a Chennai-based research and technology company, to provide large-scale innovative and inventive solutions in the education and training system.
The founders of 361 Degree Minds, C. P. Gopinathan and P. Rammohan, said it was the first round of funding from Career Launcher. Another $1 to $2 million was expected to come in the second round after six months. On the whole, Mr. Gopinathan said Career Launcher had taken only a significant minority stake in 361 Degree Minds. However, the founders did not reveal the exact stake taken by company due to non-disclosure agreement.
The founders pointed out that the investment would be used to improve the existing technology, develop new programmes, expand the market by creating newer strategies and finally invest in research. The company has so far trained over 3,500 ‘learners’ from companies such as Nokia Siemens, AstraZeneca, Career Launcher, SanDisk and Zenta.
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Mr. Gopinathan said that his company provided training from middle to senior level managers to face some of the real life problems that happened in a company. He said most of the training would happen while an employee was at work, which he called it as “Meta training”. Similarly, his company had tied up with four colleges and so far had trained nearly 5,000 college students. This training, according to him, would help these students to meet the challenges during their recruitment process. By the year end, the company planned to train near one lakh students across the country.
The Founder Chairman of Career Launcher, R. Satya Narayanan, said that his company had so far invested nearly $6 million in various start-up education-based companies across the country. He said during 2005 Career Launcher was bought out from the Intel Capital and later Gaja Capital invested $15 million into the company. As of now, the total revenue of the company was Rs. 150 crore. Globally, over 400 academics and professionals work with the company to counsel and groom over 50,000 students across 130 locations in India, the Middle East and the U.S., he said.