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#031 Why we invested in ASL (UniAcco)

Mon, 11 Sep 2023 08:35:59 GMT

Cornerstone Ventures

The dream of pursuing higher education aboard comes with its own share of challenges for any student. Every year, over 20-25 mn students traverse the daunting journey of studying abroad - right from university and the course selection, to application, arranging finances, complex visa applications, and finding an accommodation for more than year. Adventum Student Living (ASL) is disrupting the market with its mission to simplify the study abroad experience with personalized counselling, innovative financing options, and seamless accommodation services, ensuring that every aspect of students’ journey is met with expert guidance and support.

Founded by Amit Singh and Sayantan Biswas, ASL is an end-to-end student admission lifecycle management platform from application to accommodation. It offers 3 key solutions under its sub-brands as follows:

UniScholars (Admissions & Counselling), is a premier digital counselling platform for the admission process starting with student counselling, university application & review, interview preparation and selection process. UniScholars brings a digitised and standardised experience to the counselling process which is otherwise pretty much broken, fragmented and unstructured. The platform is powered by ML-based matching algorithms to allocate appropriate counsellors to students based on their profile, intent, course selection and other variables. The platform also recommends the best suited universities with highest probability of admission based on the students profile and the unwritten university criteria learnt by the platform over time.
UniCreds (Education Financing) is a global education financing platform backed by 20+ global lending partners. It automates an applicant’s journey of financing by enabling initial underwriting, digital kyc, profiling and application processing. The platform, on the basis of students’ profile connects them with a suitable lender with the lowest interest rate possible and the best turnaround time. The platform offers loans in all major currencies – USD, Euro, Pound, INR, etc. and provides the flexibility to the students to chose from lenders in their home country or lenders in their destination country.
UniAcco (Student Accommodation Marketplace), is an integrated marketplace for students to discover, evaluate, compare and book short-term and long-term rental student accommodations across the globe. It’s a market leader in UK student accommodation and an emerging player in Canada, Australia and the US. Its built a massive inventory of 3M+ beds across 500+ PBSAs. It provides 100+ parameters for students to compare & select the property that best meets their needs. ASL’s partnerships with some of the top PBSAs like Blackstone and Brookfield gives it exclusive access to inventory

Why we invested in ASL?

Tech-enabled, scalable, integrated platform – The higher education assistance market is highly fragmented with thousands of small regional & local operators providing piece meal solutions in a service-based model. ASL is the only platform in India that is building a productized solution with a standardized experience encompassing the entire student lifecycle journey – counselling, financing and accommodation under one umbrella, powered by a community-led platform. This makes it highly scalable and cost-efficient compared to any other regional player
Large Market Opportunity, ripe for consolidation – The international student education market is estimated at $200 billion, primarily dominated by tuition fees (~40%) and accommodation (~25%) as the largest categories. Over 20-25 million students travel outside their home cities for higher studies at a global scale. There are only a handful of scaled players that can cater to 1000+ students – leaving a huge room for organized players to consolidate
Value-chain Controller – Because of its integrated approach, ASL is a significant controller in the entire value-chain. Right from its partnerships with PBSAs like Blackstone for exclusive inventory access, to its network of partner universities and network of lending partners, ASL has built an unmatched network of supply that touches every aspect of the students application journey, making it an indispensable platform and one of the largest demand generator for any service provider in the ecosystem.

Learn more about: CSVP Fund | CGES Index | Enterprise SaaS

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