FrontRow raises $14 mn in funding from Eight Roads Ventures, others

FrontRow, a learning platform for non-academic skills, on Tuesday said it has raised USD 14 million (about Rs 103.2 crore) in funding, led by Eight Roads Ventures and GSV.

The Series A round also saw participation from existing investors - Lightspeed and Elevation Capital as well as angel investors like Vishal Dadlani, Raftaar, Kunal Shah, Gaurav Munjal, Farid Ahsan and multiple leaders across the startup and entertainment world, a statement said.

The company plans to use the funds to scale to over 10 categories and more than 300 courses over the next year, it added. Founded by Shubhadit Sharma, Mikhil Raj and Ishaan Preet Singh about 9 months ago, FrontRow has scaled to over 50,000 paid learners across more than 2,000 cities globally, with users spending over a million hours learning on the platform.

FrontRow had earlier raised a USD 3.2 million in the seed round led by Lightspeed, Elevation and Deepika Padukone's Family Office.

Talking about his investment in FrontRow, Vishal Dadlani said edtech is something he is passionate about, both as a musician who appreciates the wide access it provides to real and useful knowledge and content, and as an investor who sees the strength of the business model. ''Above all else, of everything one sees out there, FrontRow is clearly the best online platform to learn and practice music. That alone is enough reason for me to want to be a part of it,” he added.

Ishaan Singh, co-founder of FrontRow, said the company will also be investing heavily in the team and product.

“Our goal is to help you learn in the best way possible, across categories and mediums. 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 edtech,'' he added.