InOpen, an educational service provider has raised a seed funding of $500,000 from VenturEast following which, the latter picks up a minority stake in the company. InOpen provides educational content to schools, and claims that its e-books have been downloaded in more than 100 countries. Their flagship product ComputerMasti, facilitates learning computers is available in 8 Indian languages and 2 foreign languages. InOpen claims to currently caters to 40,000 students and intends to reach 1 million students in the next 2 years. It plans to grow its sales more than 7 times in FY 2011-12 compared to FY 2010-11, and will use the money raised on research and enhancing logistical capacities, apart from bringing more people on board. InOpen is also planning to launch a new product named TuxMate which will be offering diploma and short term courses in Linux, Shell Scripting and Kernel Programming. The company which was founded in 2009 is currently incubated at IIT Bombay. Its clientele includes schools like Jamnabai Narsee, Al Barkat Public School, APS, Fatehpur Sikri and others. Other companies in the education space include Educomp Solutions Ltd, Pearson, EdServ SoftSystems among others. EdServ recently announced its intentions of raising $35 million through a GDR issue to fund the company’s expansion plans. The company also entered the mobile space by lauching HumThum, a platform for offer its own educational content,along with localized information, classifieds and utilities such as an image to PDF converter and a bar code scanner. Related: - Edserv To Raise $35M; Trying Their Education App…
