Virohan Pvt. Ltd., Gurgaon based leading healthcare vocational institute announced raising $2.8 Million across seed and Series A funding.

As part of the total fundraise, the seed round was led by Keiretsu Forum and series A round was led by the Elea Foundation for Ethics in Globalization and by the Singh Family Trusts, advised by Artha Impact with participation from founders and National Skill Development Corporation.

Virohan, a training partner of NSDC and a Yunus Social business Investee company, works with GE Healthcare and the Indian Medical Association (IMA) among others across India to provide youth with a career in the healthcare sector and make available trained workforce to the industry.

The latest and the fresh investment round will enable Virohan to continue to introduce and expand new virtual technologies in the vocational training segment allowing for greater accessibility, scalability, and immersion at affordable costs.

Especially, the company will use the funding to expand its content library by introducing standardized content to students in 15 additional languages and grow its partnerships from dozens to hundreds of institutions. Virohan’s vision is to educate more than a million students by 2025 through its best-in-class blended learning platform.

Due to the ongoing crisis, there is tremendous demand for healthcare workers across the world and it will continue to grow exponentially over the next decade as well. Despite the huge demand for their services, this sector is highly fragmented in India.

There are massive predicted shortages across operating theatre technicians, radiology technicians, and medical lab technicians. To combat this crisis, Virohan uses its standardized training model to rapidly train and connect its users with these fast-growing jobs in the healthcare industry.

The startup was incorporated in 2018 by the founders, Kunaal Dudeja (Co-founder & CEO), Nalin Saluja (Co-founder & CTO), and Archit Jayaswal (Co-Founder & CFO).

“Workforce readiness is a huge problem in India. There is a huge disconnect between demand and supply of the skills in the workforce across sectors forcing youth to compromise on aspirations, income, and location. We are thrilled to have the support of our incredible investors as we build the most efficient and scalable learning platform for current and future healthcare professionals,” founders said in a joint statement.

It bridges the gap between industry demand and the skills of the workforce by using its ‘technology skill stack’ through which they predict job demand for each job role across India, build out the curriculum needed, and delivers standardized training through blended and online learning.

The courses offered to emphasize on development of core technical skills, language abilities, and life skills in the student through gamified blended learning delivered by its facilitators in classrooms or purely online on its myCareer app.

All programs include long internships at hospitals for hands-on practice of the skills acquired. Virohan is a fee-based model and in order to encourage young people to join, financial linkages are provided with easy installment-based payback options after a job is secured by the users

Lead investors at Elea Foundation and Artha Impact commented on the investment, “We are excited to add another innovative model in employable skill-building to our portfolios. Giving students access to quality education, equipping them with the professional and life skills to successfully contribute to India’s healthcare sector is creating long-term impact for youth who, through Virohan, can attain aspirational jobs with a career trajectory.”

They added, “As active investors, we are very much looking forward to working with Virohan’s founders and management team in the years to come, providing strategic support and sector-specific insights.”

As part of the previous round, the company had also raised debt funding worth $270,000 from Yunus Social Business in January 2020.

Virohan has trained over 3,000 students by providing skill enhancement training for healthcare practitioners and has a tremendous placement rate of >85%.

The Edtech startup is rapidly expanding its nation-wide presence courtesy to the lockdown. It has already started its training completely online while expanding to over 20 cities in the last 5 months.

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California-headquartered ZineOne, a provider of new-age customer engagement solutions for enterprises, has raised $2.5 million in a Series A round led by Omidyar Network, the Silicon Valley-based impact investing firm established by Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay.

Other investors include Harvard Business School Alumni Angels, Touchstone Equities, as well as existing investors Hyderabad Angels and Golden Seeds.

This round brings ZineOne’s total venture capital received to date to $5 million.

The company intends to use the newly-raised funds to aggressively accelerate sales, marketing, and execution of a product roadmap that is focused on building the most intelligent system within this category, with significant investments toward securing top talent in machine learning and artificial intelligence.

ZineOne is a next generation customer engagement hub that uses machine learning algorithms to provide banks and retailers with the ability to engage with their customers real-time, in a contextual and personalised manner. The platform helps enterprises connect the dots between their different customer data streams and also create actionable insights that can be used while customers are interacting with their brand in real time—such as in a branch or store, at their e-commerce website or mobile app.

“More and more enterprises around the world are recognising the need to move their customer engagement efforts beyond e-mails and call centres into an immediate, contextual, and real-time world,” said Debjani Deb, ZineOne CEO. “2018 presents an inflection point in the industry, and with this new funding, ZineOne is well positioned to lead the market in this emerging segment.“

The emerging category of customer engagement hubs is expected to disrupt an estimated $10 billion currently spent on marketing automation and customer experience software worldwide, by moving the industry away from batch emails, push messaging, and call centres, to “in the moment” interactions.

ZineOne is a player in the emerging segment of next generation customer engagement hubs, which bring together event-driven, streaming technologies to power real-time personalisation.

ZineOne claims it currently enables more than 100 million users, processing over five billion events a year, and generating 100 gigabyte of data every hour worldwide. In the US, the company works with one of the top five retailers in the country, connecting all its digital and physical channels and delivering three to five times more sales conversions through highly personalised, contextual messaging with customers through various touch points.

In India, ZineOne is enabling financial institutions to provide a better digital experience to their customers by using personalised context to nudge consumers to better financial behaviours, such as increasing savings. On average, it has helped client-banks increase transaction completion rates up to 20 per cent.

HDFC Bank, India’s largest private bank, is leveraging ZineOne’s value proposition across all its digital channels and experiencing significant gains in customer engagement, including three times the click through rate than with traditional methods.

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