Startup Deep Dive : CollegeDekho — the admissions platform that spends a rupee to earn a rupee

In the year ended March 2025, CollegeDekho took in ₹221.6 crore (about $23 million) in operating revenue and lost ₹151 crore doing it, as per financials reported by Entrackr from the company’s regulatory filing. That is the contradiction at the centre of this business: it charges colleges only when a student it counsels actually enrols, a model that should print money, yet it still spends far more to grow than it earns.

The gap is almost entirely a marketing gap. Advertising and promotion alone cost ₹126 crore in FY25, roughly a third of the company’s ₹378.8 crore total expenditure (Entrackr, September 2025). CollegeDekho counsels students for free, gets paid by the college on admission, and then buys the next student’s attention in an auction against every other admissions platform in India. This piece follows the numbers on both sides of that trade — the founding bet, the one acquisition that changed the shape of the company, the funding that kept it alive, and why revenue went flat in the year losses grew.

Quick facts

What they do

CollegeDekho is an admissions marketplace. It sits between two groups who struggle to find each other efficiently: students choosing where to study, and the roughly 1,500 partner colleges — most of them outside the elite IIT and IIM tier — that need to fill seats. What it sells:

• To students (free): college discovery, exam and course information, counselling, and a single Common Application Form to apply to multiple colleges in one flow.
• To colleges (paid): qualified student leads and completed enrolments, plus premium listings, marketing and promotion services.
• Adjacent verticals: study-abroad counselling and test prep (IELTS, TOEFL, PTE), education loans, and online upskilling under CollegeDekho Learn.

The company describes itself as among the largest student-enrolment platforms in India (company-stated). The core promise to a college is simple: counselling that is free to the student produces enrolments the college pays for only when they happen.

The origin

The founding insight came out of a newsroom, not a classroom. Before starting CollegeDekho in 2015, Ruchir Arora ran the education business at HT Media, where he watched a steady stream of students being funnelled into engineering or medicine less by aptitude than by what everyone around them was doing. India has thousands of colleges beyond the handful that dominate the headlines, and almost no trustworthy, neutral way for a seventeen-year-old to compare them.

Arora built the platform with Saurabh Jain and Rohit Saha, friends from his engineering days, aiming at exactly that gap: the non-IIT, non-IIM colleges that account for the overwhelming majority of Indian higher-education seats. The venture was incubated by GirnarSoft, the Jaipur group founded by Amit Jain that also built CarDekho. According to Arora’s own retelling on the FounderThesis podcast, he had a different name in mind until Amit Jain made naming it “CollegeDekho” a condition of backing it, on the logic that “Dekho has been lucky for us.” Arora bought the domain and kept the name. The company has been part of the CarDekho Group’s orbit ever since — a lineage that matters again at the end of this story.

The struggle years

CollegeDekho’s problem was never demand. It was the cost of turning demand into paid enrolments, and the years show a company that kept growing the top line while never getting the unit economics to close.

• Small and loss-making early on: revenue was ₹37.5 crore in FY20 and ₹47.9 crore in FY21, with net losses of ₹27.2 crore and ₹21.3 crore in those years respectively (per earlier filings reported by thekredible and Inc42).
• Financial opacity in FY22: the company did not file detailed FY22 accounts on time and declined to confirm the numbers, stating only that revenue was near ₹100 crore and on track to treble (company-stated, 2022). Audited FY22 figures were not publicly available.
• The edtech reset: CollegeDekho scaled through 2022–2023 into the sector-wide edtech downturn, when funding dried up and marketing costs stayed high. Losses stayed heavy: about ₹129 crore in FY23 and again in FY24 (Inc42; Entrackr).
• Cost surgery in FY25: the company cut employee-benefit expense by 25% to ₹117 crore in FY25 from ₹156 crore in FY24 — a reduction of that size points to significant headcount and pay restructuring (Entrackr, September 2025).

The through-line: even after nearly a decade, spending stayed ahead of revenue. In FY24 the company spent about ₹1.62 for every ₹1 of operating revenue it booked (Entrackr).

The turning point

The single event that changed the company’s shape was inorganic. In February 2022, CollegeDekho acquired two rivals — Getmyuni and IELTSMaterial — in a deal reported at more than ₹50 crore (Business Standard; Inc42; Entrackr). Getmyuni was a Times Internet-backed college-discovery platform; IELTSMaterial added English-test preparation that fed the study-abroad funnel.

The numbers on each side of that deal tell the story. Before it, CollegeDekho’s revenue was around ₹100 crore (company-stated FY22). After absorbing the acquisitions, consolidated revenue from operations moved to ₹163 crore in FY23 and then jumped 32% to about ₹216 crore in FY24 (Entrackr). The company said the combination made it the largest student-enrolment platform in India, with the two brands together handling a large share of college searches and facilitating tens of thousands of enrolments across more than 1,000 partner colleges (company-stated, February 2022). The acquisition bought scale and traffic; it did not, as later years showed, buy profitability.

The money behind it

CollegeDekho has raised over $90 million across its life (Inc42), with Tracxn cataloguing cumulative funding closer to $105.8 million; the difference reflects how debt and small tranches are counted. The shape of the equity story:

• Series B — $35 million, December 2021: led by Winter Capital Partners and ETS Strategic Capital, with Calega and existing backer Man Capital, and new investors QIC and Disrupt ADQ completing the round (Business Standard, December 2021). An earlier tranche of about $26.5 million rolled into this full $35 million round.
• Extended Series B — about $9 million, December 2022: from existing investors including Winter Capital Partners (Inc42; EdTechReview).
• 2024 top-up at a $138 million valuation: the company was reported to have raised about $9 million from existing investors, with its valuation reported around $138 million (Inc42; PitchBook, July 2024).
• Parent support and debt, December 2025: a roughly $10 million infusion associated with the CarDekho Group (Inc42), plus ₹40 crore in debt from Recur Club (Outlook Business).

What each backer changed: ETS Strategic Capital, the investment arm of the US testing body behind the TOEFL and GRE, aligned with the study-abroad and test-prep push; Man Capital and Winter Capital provided the growth-stage cheques that funded the acquisitions; and the CarDekho Group has repeatedly acted as the backstop when external money was scarce.

How it makes money

The revenue engine is success-based lead generation for colleges, layered with marketing services. Based on the heads disclosed in its filings (Entrackr), money comes in through:

• Commission on admissions: the largest stream — colleges pay when a counselled student enrols.
• Marketing, promotion and advertising services: premium listings and paid visibility for partner institutions.
• Online coaching and tech solutions: test-prep and platform services, expanded via IELTSMaterial and PrepBytes.
• Interest and investment income: about ₹6 crore in FY25, taking total income to roughly ₹227.7 crore (Entrackr).

Where the margin sits — and the part people get wrong: because counselling is free to students, many assume the student is the customer. The customer is the college. The economics therefore live or die on customer-acquisition cost. Costs out are dominated by two heads:

• Advertising and promotion: ₹126 crore in FY25 (up about 31% year on year), roughly a third of total expenditure (Entrackr).
• Employee benefits: ₹117 crore in FY25, including ₹7.4 crore of non-cash ESOP cost (Entrackr).
• Outsourcing and subcontracting: ₹31.5 crore in FY25, roughly double the prior year, reflecting a shift of counselling capacity to third parties (Entrackr).

The numbers

Revenue from operations, net loss and total expenditure over four years, in ₹ crore (consolidated where reported; sources: Entrackr and Inc42):

The pattern is stark. Revenue grew 32% in FY24, then just 2.8% in FY25 — effectively flat. In the same year losses widened 19% to ₹151 crore, because advertising spend rose even as the top line stopped moving. The company’s reported EBITDA margin in FY25 was about -56.9%, and cash and bank balances stood at roughly ₹37 crore at year-end against an annual loss more than four times that size (Entrackr) — context for why parent and debt funding followed in December 2025.

Where the money comes from

CollegeDekho does not publish a clean segment-by-segment revenue table, so the split below is qualitative, drawn from the revenue heads in its filings and its own descriptions (Entrackr; company statements):

• Core admissions (B2B from colleges): the dominant source, via commission on enrolments and marketing services paid by roughly 1,500 partner colleges.
• Study-abroad and test prep: counselling for overseas admissions plus IELTS/TOEFL/PTE preparation, strengthened by the IELTSMaterial acquisition.
• Education lending and online learning: loan facilitation and CollegeDekho Learn courses, the latter expanded through PrepBytes.

The surprise: a platform whose entire consumer brand is built around helping students choose colleges earns almost nothing directly from those students. The revenue is B2B — colleges buying enrolments — while the student side is a free acquisition funnel. That inversion is exactly why marketing is the largest line item: the “product” the company sells to colleges is student attention, and attention has to be bought each cycle.

The risks

• Marketing-dependent growth: in FY25, advertising was ₹126 crore against ₹221.6 crore of revenue. When the company held or cut spend, revenue went flat (2.8% growth). A model where the top line tracks ad spend so closely has no cheap path to profitability — every extra rupee of revenue seems to need a rupee of promotion behind it (Entrackr).
• Cash and burn mismatch: a ₹151 crore FY25 loss against roughly ₹37 crore of year-end cash means the business cannot self-fund. It has leaned on its parent (the ~$10 million CarDekho-linked infusion) and on debt (₹40 crore from Recur Club) in December 2025. Continued operation depends on that support continuing (Entrackr; Inc42; Outlook Business).
• Concentration and counterparty risk: revenue depends on partner colleges paying success fees. Provisions for doubtful debts appear among the rising cost heads (Entrackr), a sign that collecting from institutions is not frictionless; a downturn in private-college admissions would hit the core stream directly.

The takeaway

CollegeDekho’s ten years hold one transferable lesson: a “free for the user, paid by the other side” marketplace is only as good as its acquisition cost. The success-fee model looks elegant on a slide — you get paid only when value is delivered — but if you have to buy each user in an open auction, the margin you earned on the enrolment can walk straight back out as the cost of finding the next one. The FY25 result, flat revenue with widening losses, is what that trap looks like on an income statement. The strategic question for the company is not whether it can grow; it grew revenue more than fourfold from FY21 to FY25. It is whether it can grow the next rupee for less than a rupee. Until it can, scale and losses rise together.

Frequently asked questions

What is CollegeDekho and who owns it?

CollegeDekho is an Indian college-admissions and counselling platform founded in 2015. Its legal entity is Girnarsoft Education Services Private Limited, part of the CarDekho Group. Its lead investors include Winter Capital Partners, ETS Strategic Capital, Man Capital and QIC.

How does CollegeDekho make money?

Primarily through success-based fees: partner colleges pay when a student CollegeDekho counsels enrols. It also earns from marketing and promotion services for colleges, online test prep and coaching, and education-loan facilitation. Counselling is free to students, so colleges are the paying customers.

What were CollegeDekho’s revenue and loss in FY25?

Operating revenue was ₹221.6 crore in FY25, up marginally from ₹215.6 crore in FY24, while net loss widened to ₹151 crore from about ₹127–129 crore, as per financials reported by Entrackr from the company’s filing.

Is CollegeDekho profitable or listed?

No on both counts. It is a private, unlisted company and remained loss-making in FY25, with a reported EBITDA margin of about -56.9%. It has relied on investor equity, parent-group support and debt to fund operations.

What did CollegeDekho acquire?

In February 2022 it acquired Getmyuni and IELTSMaterial in a deal reported at more than ₹50 crore, and it later added PrepBytes to expand its online learning vertical. The Getmyuni deal, in particular, marked its shift to being one of India’s larger student-enrolment platforms.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Entrackr — “CollegeDekho posts Rs 151 Cr loss in FY25, revenue remains flat” (September 2025)
• Entrackr — “CollegeDekho’s revenue shoots up 32% to Rs 216 Cr in FY24” (2024)
• Entrackr — “Exclusive: CollegeDekho acquires GetMyUni in all-cash deal” (February 2022)
• Inc42 — CollegeDekho company profile and financials; “CollegeDekho’s Loss Flat At INR 129 Cr In FY24” (2024)
• Business Standard — “CollegeDekho closes $35mn Series B round led by Winter Capital, ETS” (December 2021); “CollegeDekho acquires Getmyuni for Rs 50 crore” (February 2022)
• PitchBook — CollegeDekho company profile, valuation and funding (2024)
• Outlook Business — “Edtech Start-Up CollegeDekho Secures Rs 40 Cr from Recur Club” (2025)
• FounderThesis — “CollegeDekho’s Ruchir Arora: Building a ₹221 Crore Business on India’s Non-IIT Colleges” (podcast interview)
• thekredible — CollegeDekho financials (FY20–FY21 revenue and loss history)
• Tracxn — Girnarsoft Education Services Private Limited profile and cumulative funding (2026)
• Trading Economics — USD/INR reference rate (18 September 2026)

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