Providing educational institutions with tailor-made payment options, GrayQuest raises $7 million in Series A funding round

GrayQuest, an Indian startup that partners with educational institutions to break up fees into equated monthly instalments, announced recently that it has raised Rs 56 crore (about $7 million) in its Series A funding round.

The round was led by Pravega Ventures, with participation also from family investors such as Weizmann Group, Telama Family Office and Apurva Parekh (Pidilite Family Office). Existing investors such as the family offices of Ashok Wadhwa (Founder – Ambit Capital) and Yogesh Mahansaria also joined the funding round. 

According to founder and CEO Rishab Mehta, GrayQuest intends to use the fresh capital to enhance its product offerings and scale up distribution across the education ecosystem with the aim to start operating in the education loans space.

Founded by Rishab Mehta in 2017, GQ offers educational institutions a unified payments platform to enable them to digitize and boost their fee collection. Its platform enables institutions to offer their parents multiple tailor-made payment options, including a convenient monthly payment option to pay their annual education fees without bearing any extra costs.
The startup currently claims that it has partnered with over 5,000 schools, universities and coaching centres that serve about three million students across the country.

While it operates pan-India, about 60% of GrayQuest’s revenue currently comes from the West and South of the country. The company’s revenue grew about 4X in 2021, 3X in 2022 and it intends to grow by 3X in 2023, Mehta added, declining to share specific numbers.
“Our data, across multiple cohorts, indicates Indian families consistently spend over 20% of their annual household income on their children’s education fees (across schools and higher education). Our range of payment and technology solutions have demonstrated tremendous positive results for both parents and educational institutions relating to education fee payments,” Mehta said.

India’s education ecosystem is one of the world’s largest with about $100 billion of education fees paid annually, said Vinay Menon, co-founder, Pravega Ventures. “However, we found it to be surprisingly underserved in terms of the payment solutions available for the ecosystem.