In February 2013, serial entrepreneurs K Ganesh and Meena Ganesh sold their entire stake in TutorVista, an online tutoring company, to UK's Pearson for $213 million. However, the potential of the sector was so overwhelming that the husband-wife duo returned to the fray with Avagmah, a portal with online courses for working professionals.

“There is an evolving disruption in this space. Everyone is becoming a learner at their own convenience, their own time, leisure and place and everyone is becoming a teacher too, and there lies the opportunity,” Ganesh told BusinessLine .

“This should be termed ‘ed-tech’ as now technology, social media and a lot of personalisation are happening in education,” he added.

True, the potential is enormously high. According to estimates, online education is already an $8-billion industry in India, and is poised to grow to $50 billion by 2020. There are 100-150 start-ups already operating in this space.

Fund raising spree Having set the ball rolling, many of the start-ups are on a frenzy to raise funds.

Avagmah (learning in Sanskrit), which had got funding from Capital18 (Network18 group), is hunting for more. As are Function Space Labs, Liqvid eLearning Services and others in this space.

Function Space is looking to raise $5-10 million to set up offices in Pune and San Francisco. The Pune-based company, which had earlier received seed funding from Nexus Venture Partners, is a social learning network focusing on mathematics, physics and science streams.

“Definitely, the offline education industry across the globe is huge and the costs for learning have been on the rise. Our intention is to reach out to the masses and reduce costs,” Function Space Co-Founder Sumit Maniyar told BusinessLine .

Liqvid eLearning Services is another firm looking to raise funds.

The company, which focuses mainly on English learning, is looking to raise $5-10 million in the next three-six months. Liqvid will use most of the funding for brand building, and to scale up operations.

“This is definitely a sector poised for takeoff. The increasing use of mobile phones, emergence of technology, the growing importance of education and rise in incomes would aid this sector,” Liqvid Founder and Chief Executive Officer Vivek Agarwal said.

E-learning site MeritNation.com, run by Applect Learning Systems, had earlier raised a little over ₹60 crore from Info Edge (India) in two tranches.

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