Egurucool.com to float ADR issue, plans major acquisitions in India

Bangalore, September 1: Egurucool.com, the education and career portal, is looking at Nasdaq listing through an American Depository Receipts (ADR) in six to nine months, according to the company’s managing director and co-founder Vivek Agarwal. He said that the listing would facilitate increased capital flow in the company which was essential to fund its various acquisition plans in India. On acquisition plans, he said, "We are looking at various portals and firms in India which will provide synergy to our line of business." He said currently the portal was in the process of finalising its second round of venture capital funds over Rs 10 crore. The funds were expected to be in within six weeks, he said. In the first round, egurucool had received Rs 10 crore from Chrysalis Capital in February. He said the funds would be used towards acquiring more content, conduct marketing and promotional activities, to improve technology and infrastructure and also to enhance personnel strength.

Agarwal said the company was in talks with various portals and Websites including firstandsecond.com for tie-ups in content, services and marketing.Egurucool.com was planning a major promotional campaign involving print, electronic, out door and direct marketing. He said the company had been conducting seminars to create awareness on Net learning and education. It already conducted workshops in Delhi and Mumbai while Chennai and Bangalore would have them soon.

He said the portal would soon launch its paid courses within a couple of weeks. The portal would have roped in around 200 schools across the country by November, he said. “Our immediate focus will be on schools as e-learning is going to be the next killer application after e-mail,” he said.

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The portal would be concentrating more on increasing content in two to three weeks. It would also overhaul its foreign education channel. Egurucool would enhance the number of its e-partners for sales and marketing across the country from the current 35.

Since its launch in November last year, the portal had received over 1.5 million pages views. The portal currently has a personnel strength of 90 people in eight offices.