CollegeDekho's Ruchir Arora: Building a ₹221 Crore Business on India's Non-IIT Colleges

Ruchir Arora's CollegeDekho earns on every application and every admission, at 80% gross margin. Here is how a $90 million marketplace actually works.

Sep 08, 2026

In an Indian classroom of fifty students, roughly five get the full attention of the school. The ones with the IIT posters, the ones the principal mentions at assembly. Ruchir Arora was one of them, in Meerut, in the 1990s. What stayed with him was what happened to everybody else.

“From roll number six to fifty, nobody really cares,” he says. “And that’s where the problem is.”

Ruchir Arora is the co-founder and CEO of CollegeDekho, a Gurugram company that helps Indian students find, apply to and pay for a college seat, and charges the colleges rather than the students for it. Founded in 2015 with Saurabh Jain, Rohit Saha and Rajiv Singh, CollegeDekho has raised roughly $90 million, was last valued at $138 million, and filed ₹221.6 crore in operating revenue for the year ended March 2025. It has partnered with more than 2,000 institutions and says it has counselled over 1.2 million students.

The interesting part is not the size. It is what CollegeDekho decided to sell, and to whom.

Who is Ruchir Arora, the founder of CollegeDekho?

Arora grew up in Meerut and studied mechanical engineering at VNIT Nagpur. He wrote code for a living first, at Birlasoft, IBM and CSC, before an MBA in IT and finance at the Indian School of Business took him into Tech Mahindra.

The turn came in 2007, when he joined Firefly e-Ventures, the digital arm HT Media was building to do to classifieds what Times Internet was doing on the other side of the newsstand. Arora was one of the first few employees, doing financial planning but also hunting for things the group could buy or build. That put him in board meetings in his early thirties, listening to people run a media business.

In one of those meetings the question came up: what should we do in education? The group had already built Shine.com for jobs. Somebody pointed at Arora.

“In fact he also told me that if it works I’ll hire a CEO for the business, but you make it work.”

He made it work. HTCampus, the education classifieds property Arora founded inside HT Media in 2010, broke even in its second year and ran for about five. Then, at 35, with an offer from one of the big internet companies on the table and a plan to do a second MBA in the US, he left.

“If I don’t take this risk now,” he remembers thinking, “then it’s not happening.”

Why did CollegeDekho target the 49,000 colleges outside India’s top 100?

Indian edtech in 2015 was pointed almost entirely at test preparation. The unicorns that followed, Byju’s and Unacademy and Vedantu among them, were all in the business of getting students into the roughly one hundred institutions everybody has heard of.

Arora had run the numbers on the other side of that. By his count India has around 53,000 degree-granting colleges taking in ten to eleven million students a year, against roughly four thousand institutions for twenty million students in the United States. Seventy per cent of Indian enrolment goes to private colleges, the result of a policy choice made decades ago to let private capital build capacity the state could not.

So the market was not the top hundred. It was everything else.

“You can know almost everything about the top 100 colleges,” Arora says. “The moment I ask you what is the 101st college, you go blank.”

That was the product. Not coaching, not a shortcut into an IIT, but information about the 49,000 colleges nobody wrote about, given free to the student. CollegeDekho’s first year went into content: teams travelling city by city, shooting video walkthroughs of campuses, building course and admission data for institutions that in many cases had no website of their own. Colleges welcomed the cameras. They had spent crores on campuses nobody outside the district had seen.

The company still refuses to rate or rank the colleges it lists, on the argument that judgement introduces bias and aspiration is relative anyway. Arora’s team once surveyed students at colleges ranked 200 to 500 and found they wanted an IIM. They surveyed IIM students, who wanted Stanford.

The incumbent when Arora started was Shiksha, from the Info Edge stable, a pure classifieds play. CollegeDekho today competes with Collegedunia, LeverageEdu and Embibe, alongside GetMyUni, which it went on to buy.

How did CollegeDekho get its name from CarDekho?

Arora had a different name in mind and a bootstrapped company when he met Amit Jain, who with his brother Anurag had built CarDekho into the country’s largest auto classifieds business. Jain liked the idea, offered to put group money in, and made one condition.

“He said you should take this name CollegeDekho, because Dekho has been lucky for us.”

Arora bought the domain from him. GirnarSoft, the CarDekho parent, seeded the company and handed over a college database and some content it had already assembled, which shortened the first year considerably.

That relationship still matters. CarDekho Group holds roughly 40% of CollegeDekho, and in December 2025 it invested a further $10 million, weeks after its own merger talks with CarTrade collapsed and ahead of a planned public listing.

How does CollegeDekho make money?

The original model was ordinary classifieds. Publish content, collect traffic, sell banner space and student enquiries to colleges. Arora knew how to run it because he had run it before. Within a year he moved off it.

In 2016 CollegeDekho launched what it calls India’s first Common Application Form. A student picks courses and colleges, applies to all of them in one flow, pays through an aggregated gateway, and gets the receipt and eventually the offer letter on the platform. This sounds unremarkable now. In 2015 and 2016 and 2017, Indian colleges were still mailing out paper forms and accepting demand drafts.

That single product changed what CollegeDekho was selling. It stopped selling data and started selling outcomes. The college pays a fee when an application arrives, and a much larger one when the student actually enrols, on average around 25% of the first year’s tuition. The student pays nothing, and often pays less than applying directly, because the aggregated gateway carries offers a single college cannot negotiate.

Year one on that model: fifty colleges, a thousand applications. By the time of this interview, 125,000 applications in the prior year and roughly 25,000 admissions from them, across about 1,500 partner colleges. Arora’s target was 8,000 to 10,000, the point at which he believes a student’s choice is genuinely complete.

The economics are why the model held. Because so much of the traffic arrives organically off the content library and word of mouth, acquisition costs stay low. Arora put gross margin on the admissions business at about 80%, and the lifetime-value-to-acquisition-cost ratio at eighteen to twenty, a number he called insane himself.

Two adjacent lines run off the same funnel. Study abroad came from students simply asking, and CollegeDekho bought a firm called Scholarship Facilitation Services to get the operators rather than the software. Education finance came next, working through NBFCs rather than lending itself, against an average Indian semester fee of ₹60,000. Arora is candid that the lending makes very little on its own, in a market Founder Thesis has covered from the lender’s side with LEO1 and Kuhoo. Its job is distribution, closing admissions that would otherwise stall on affordability.

Who were the 10,000 middlemen CollegeDekho set out to replace?

Here is the part of the business most people outside it have never heard of.

India has an estimated ten thousand offline admission consultants, working out of small offices in towns a hundred kilometres from Patna or Bhagalpur, and between them they place somewhere near 25 to 30% of all Indian college admissions. That is roughly thirty lakh students a year, in a higher education market Arora sizes at around $70 billion in fees.

A consultant typically represents two or three colleges. Those are the two or three the student hears about.

Arora knows the model from the receiving end. In Meerut, his family used one for the Maharashtra applications.

“We were paying him, not knowing that he’s getting paid from the college as well.”

CollegeDekho’s answer was to put twenty thousand colleges on a page with video and data attached, let the student research all of them, and let them apply to the subset it partners with. Same commission structure as the consultant. Radically wider shelf.

Doing that at scale meant industrialising what consultants keep in their heads. Delhi University alone runs six cut-offs a year, adjusted for Kashmiri Pandit status, state-level cricket, athletics and more. CollegeDekho spent years pushing that into rule engines and a knowledge graph, on one specific insight about its market.

“Parents keep changing, teachers keep changing, students keep changing. Questions don’t change.”

How much funding has CollegeDekho raised and what is its valuation?

CollegeDekho was bootstrapped for roughly four years, and Arora says it was healthily EBITDA-profitable at a run rate around ₹50 to ₹60 crore before it took institutional money.

The Series B changed the pace. Announced at $26.5 million in September 2021 and closed at $35 million that December, it was led by Winter Capital Partners and ETS Strategic Capital, the private equity arm of the organisation behind the TOEFL and GRE, with Calega, Man Capital, Disrupt ADQ and QIC. Extensions followed: $9 million in December 2022, another $9 million in July 2024 at a $138 million valuation flat on the previous round, and $3.5 million from Lighthouse Canton in April 2025. Total raised is roughly $90 million including debt.

The capital bought consolidation: GetMyUni and IELTSMaterial together for more than ₹50 crore in February 2022, PrepBytes a month later, the design-education firm ImaginXP in October 2023, the agency Unipto Education, and Scholarship Facilitation Services. Six acquisitions, seven brands. GetMyUni was about traffic above all. Between the two properties, Arora estimated they were touching about half of India’s college-going search traffic and five million student enquiries a year.

What happened to CollegeDekho Learn, and where does the business stand now?

The second act was supposed to be teaching.

Not machine learning, and pointedly not coding. CollegeDekho Learn was built to teach the syllabus students were already failing: financial accounting for a first-year BCom, income tax, engineering drawing. Arora’s own memory of engineering drawing, and of having to go to a professor’s house to get through it at a top-twenty institution, is the whole thesis. A student in a smaller town has no such door to knock on.

Courses were priced at ₹4,000 to ₹5,000, roughly what an offline tutor charges, with free recorded video and paid live doubt resolution on top. At the time of the interview Learn had about a thousand students and 20% of that month’s revenue. Arora’s projection: by 2025, admissions and Learn would each be about 40% of the business.

The filings tell a different story about that period. CollegeDekho’s consolidated revenue from operations came in at ₹221.6 crore in FY25, against ₹215.6 crore in FY24. Net loss widened 19% to ₹151 crore, from ₹127 crore. Total expenditure rose to ₹378.8 crore, even as employee benefit costs were cut 25% to ₹117 crore. EBITDA margin stood at -56.9%.

In December 2025, announcing CarDekho’s $10 million follow-on, Arora said the company had reached profitability, and set out a plan to push deeper into tier-II and tier-III cities and expand CollegeDekho Assured, the programme under which partner universities run industry-aligned degrees on CollegeDekho’s curriculum. Both statements are on the record, a year apart. The next filings will settle which trajectory the business is on.

What is not in dispute is the market Arora went looking for. Ten years on, the questions still don’t change, the consultants are still in Bhagalpur, and there are still 49,000 colleges nobody writes about. Other founders have come at that same student from other angles, Ashish Munjal at Sunstone running degrees inside partner campuses, Anil Nagar at Adda247 building employability content for Bharat, Satya Narayanan R at CL Educate working the problem since the nineties.

Arora decided to charge the colleges for it.