Nspira Management Services, an education services provider, said on Wednesday it raised $75 million in an equity investment which saw participation of a fund managed by Morgan Stanley Private Equity Asia, and BanyanTree Growth Capital II.
The fund managed by Morgan Stanley Private Equity Asia (MSPEA) has invested about $67 million of primary capital in the company for a minority stake.
The proceeds will be used to fund the organic and inorganic growth plans of the company.
“We will be deploying the funds to scale our business geographically, increase our client base, develop cutting-edge education products, modernise our facilities and scale up our digital business. We will also evaluate inorganic opportunities that are synergistic with our core business and help us diversify our offerings,” said Puneet Kothapa, managing director of Nspira, in a statement.
Nspira is one of the largest management services players in the private education space in India, and provides end-to-end spectrum of services to over 500 educational institutions with a student base of close to 400,000 across 13 states in India.
Nspira also offers coaching services in the medical and engineering competitive examinations space.
“Education service is one of the core focus sectors for MSPEA across Asia. We believe private education in India is poised for a strong growth phase, driven by the large demand-supply gap for quality education as well as by increasing disposable incomes and urbanisation,” said Nirav Mehta, managing director, MSPEA in India.
Anand Rathi acted as the sole financial advisor to Nspira for this transaction.
Through its research and development wing, Nspira designs and curates curriculum and examination content, including digital content for schools and colleges. Its core competency is in admission services, infrastructure management, procurement, catering, and transport and hostel management services. It also provides Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions including enterprise resource planning, and human resources and customer relationship management to large educational groups.
"We believe the business model of Nspira is highly scalable and with continuous innovations it shall be relevant to needs of students going forward,” said Naval Totla, managing director of BanyanTree Growth Capital.
This is the second round of fund raising for Nspira after raising $60 million structured debt in 2016 from Olympus Capital Asia Credit and CX Partners.