Ritesh Raushan
March, 2015

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motivation for taking GATE was primarily for M.E. / M. Tech admissions at IITs / IISc and NITs. In recent years more and more PSUs have standardized GATE scores as qualifying criteria for most of the recruitments. HPCL, BPCL, IOCL, NHPC,NTPC, Power Grid, CONCOR, GAIL, DDA, BHEL, BEL, TCIL, NALCO, MECL, MECON etc. accept GATE Score. PSU ambition is fuelling growth of GATE applicants.
THE GATE ACADEMY story began in 2009. It started at a very small level with the first branch at Bangalore. Nitin Rakesh Prasad, GATE All India Rank 9 holder and an alumnus of IISc Bangalore used to take care of the academic side of the venture. I contributed towards the expansion of the Brand using a Franchisee model.
GATE Test Prep sector, in its initial years, was primarily unorganized. It had local level individual tuitions houses, some local stars and only one organized played. We saw a clear opportunity in the organized sector and hence took a plunge. Being an organized player with pan India presence we are able to deliver quality through our teachers who travel and teach. With 50+ centers and thousands of GATE aspirants, we are able to provide accurate benchmarking via our Mock Tests.
GATE aspirants are growing year on year. In 2009, 1.43 lac students applied for GATE whereas by 2014 it has increased to 10 lac applications. It is more than 500% growth and we expect this to grow more in coming years.
Funding “The GATE Academy”
Nitin Rakesh Prasad and I were the co-founders of The GATE Academy. The venture was initially self-funded. We managed to raise Rs. 45 lakhs in our first round of angel funding in 2012 and in round two another amount of Rs. 75 lakhs in 2013.
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