Deepika Padukone backed ed-tech startup FrontRow raises USD 14 million

By: WE Staff | Wednesday, 22 September 2021

A learning platform for non-academic skills, FrontRow has raised $14 million led by Eight Roads Ventures and GSV with participation from existing investors Lightspeed and Elevation Capital. The round also saw participation from angels like Raftaar, Gaurav Munjal, Vishal Dadlani, Kunal Shah, Farid Ahsan and multiple leaders across the startup and entertainment world.

The company aims to utilise the funds to scale to over 10 categories and 300 courses over the next year. Ishaan Singh, co-founder, FrontRow said they’ll be investing heavily on team and product, “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 ed-tech.”

Aditya Systla, Partner, 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 the 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.”

FrontRow was founded by Shubhadit Sharma, Ishaan Preet Singh and Mikhil Raj nine months ago. The platform offers a learning experience with lead ship courses taught by an industry committed persons such as Neha Kakkar, Amit Trivedi, DIVINE, Suresh Raina and more than 100 live courses taught by influencers and experts for learners to have good knowledge in their field.

A big differentiator for the company according to Mikhil Raj, co-founder of, FrontRow is their community and cohort-based approach, “Almost 70 per cent of learning is 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 100K+ users learn through our communities every month!”

The platform has scaled to 50,000 paid learners across over 2000 cities globally, with users spending over several hours learning on FrontRow. It has earlier raised a $3.2 million seed round led by Deepika Padukone’s Family Office, Lightspeed and Elevation.