Celebrity-powered Learning & Community Platform FrontRow Raises $14M in Series A Funding

FrontRow, a learning platform for non-academic skills, has raised $14 million (about INR 103.2 Crore) in its Series A funding round led by Eight Roads Ventures and GSV.

Existing investors Lightspeed and Elevation Capital, as well as angels such as Vishal Dhadlani, Raftaar, Kunal Shah, Gaurav Munjal, Farid Ahsan, and multiple leaders across the startup and entertainment world, have also participated in the round.

According to a press statement, the company plans to use the funds to scale to over 10 categories and more than 300 courses over the next year.

FrontRow focuses on providing non-academics courses, including singing, music composition, cricket, photography, and filmmaking from top influencers in the respective fields. The platform offers courses taught by Indian celebrities such as Amit Trivedi, Neha Kakkar, DIVINE, Biswa Kalyan Rath, Suresh Raina, and more than 100 live courses taught by influencers and experts for learners to go deeper in their field. The courses are currently priced between INR 500 and INR 2000, a one-time payment system for accessing the recorded courses for a lifetime. The platform also competes with other firms like Celebrity School, Kyt, and Mento.

Founded in 2020 by Shubhadit Sharma, Mikhil Raj, and Ishaan Preet Singh, 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.

Speaking about the company, Co-founder of FrontRow Ishaan Preet Singh said,

“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.”

Mikhil Raj, Co-founder of FrontRow said, “70% of learning is actually outside the classroom and that’s the part that hasn’t been solved yet. We enable people to learn from the best, and the small cohorts and community create a learning experience miles ahead of anything out there. In fact, we see over 100,000 users learn through our communities every month.”

Aditya Systla, Partner at Eight Roads Ventures, said,

“As investors, we’ve been a big champion of the role technology will play in disrupting multiple sectors, including education. We believe the market is highly under-served with strong secular trends in digital adoption of non-academic learning driven by the limited availability of qualified instructors, flexibility in scheduling, and lack of access to a structured curriculum. Ishaan, Mikhil Shubhadit, and the team at FrontRow have taken the ‘pursuit of passion’ digital, at a time when few others have in India. We are very excited to back one of the market-leading companies focused on non-academic learning.”

Vishal Dadlani has also commented on the investment, saying,

“EdTech is something I’m 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.”

FrontRow had earlier raised $3.2 million in seed funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Elevation Capital, with participation from Bollywood actress Deepika Padukone’s Family Office.

About the Author

Author: Shalini Pathak

Shalini Pathak is a Staff Writer at EdTechReview (ETR) – India’s leading edtech media & community. She has over four years of experience in media, covering different beats. Like all writers she’s an enthusiastic reader first with a passion to create out of the box content, and an ability to write about any topic. As a part of the ETR team, she will cover the latest in the edtech industry with a focus on edtech startup stories and their funding.

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