Sreemaan Thiruppathi Raja and Deborah Schermann are selling something most Indian banks still refuse to: a study-abroad loan that costs nothing if the graduate never lands the job.
Their company, Skillsvest, closed a ₹5.5 crore (roughly $660,000) pre-seed round in 2024, led by Plug and Play Ventures with participation from angel investor Sascha Mornell [Entrackr]. The product is an income-share agreement, or ISA, that funds 100% of a student's overseas education costs and caps repayment by an internal rate of return rather than a fixed EMI schedule [Dealroom.co]. The pitch to families is plain English: pay only if you earn [Indian Startup Times].
The bet
The ISA is not a new instrument. Lambda School tried it in US coding bootcamps. Chancen International runs it across African universities. What Skillsvest is wagering is that the model finally fits the Indian study-abroad corridor, where ticket sizes have ballooned past $80,000 for a US master's and traditional NBFCs still demand collateral or a co-signer with a fat ITR. The company's wedge is the counsellor channel: it has signed partnerships with more than 4,500 college counsellors across India [SMEStreet], the gatekeepers who already shape where 18-year-olds apply and how their parents pay.
That distribution choice matters. Indian edu-loan customer acquisition is brutally expensive when done through Google and Meta. Counsellors, by contrast, are pre-qualifying intent six to eighteen months before the funding decision. Skillsvest says it has built a waitlist of more than 3,000 students on the back of that channel [SMEStreet] and has so far deployed over ₹1.2 crore (roughly $145,000) in financing [SMEStreet]. The deployed figure is small. The waitlist-to-deployed ratio is the more interesting number, and it is the one investors will be watching.
Why it could be big
The Indian outbound education market is one of the largest cross-border consumer finance opportunities on the planet. More than 1.3 million Indian students were studying abroad as of recent government estimates, and the gap between sticker price and family liquidity has widened every year. The incumbents (HDFC Credila, Avanse, Auxilo, InCred, Prodigy Finance, MPOWER) all underwrite on collateral, co-signer income, or US-based future earnings. None of them, in the Indian market, price purely on the student's projected outcome.
Plug and Play Ventures, the lead investor, has a long fintech bench and has previously backed PayPal, Honey, and Credit Karma at early stages. Its presence on a ₹5.5 crore round is not a valuation signal so much as a network signal: ISAs require partnerships with employers and universities to make the outcome data underwrite-able, and Plug and Play is one of the more efficient ways for a Bay Area-incorporated, India-operating startup to make those introductions. Skillsvest is headquartered in California precisely so it can sit on both sides of the corridor.
Deployed capital | 0.145 | $M
Pre-seed raised | 0.66 | $M
Target students (12-18mo) | 0.075 | $M est. avg ticket
The team and traction
Raja, listed as co-founder and CEO, and Schermann, his co-founder, incorporated Skillsvest in 2024 and closed the pre-seed inside the same year [Crunchbase]. The company says it intends to fund 50 to 100 students over the next 12 to 18 months [Indian Startup Times], a deliberately small cohort that suggests the founders want to prove repayment behavior on a tight book before scaling the balance sheet. At an estimated average ticket of $50,000 to $80,000 per student, even the low end of that target implies a financing book in the $2.5 million to $8 million range, well beyond what the equity raise can cover. The mix of equity and debt in the pre-seed [CXO Digitalpulse] is the tell: warehouse capital, not venture dollars, will fund the loans themselves.
| Metric | Figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-seed raised | ₹5.5 Cr (~$660K) | Entrackr |
| Capital deployed to date | ₹1.2 Cr+ | SMEStreet |
| Student waitlist | 3,000+ | SMEStreet |
| Counsellor partners | 4,500+ | SMEStreet |
| 12-18mo funding target | 50-100 students | Indian Startup Times |
The honest counterfactual
What bears will say: ISAs have a difficult repayment-enforcement history, particularly across borders. Lambda School (now Bloom Institute of Technology) had to restructure its ISA program after regulatory pressure and weaker-than-modeled repayment. The Indian regulatory frame for ISAs is also unsettled: the RBI has not formally classified them, and the line between a deferred loan and a true equity-like income share has tax and consumer-protection implications. Recovering payments from a graduate who has moved to Berlin or Toronto is a litigation problem no Indian fintech has yet solved at scale.
What bulls answer: Skillsvest is underwriting the highest-signal slice of the market, students with admits to programs whose graduate salary distributions are already public and tight. The IRR cap [Dealroom.co] limits the upside-tail risk that gave Lambda its PR problems, and the counsellor channel filters for students whose academic profile already correlates with employability. The small initial cohort lets the company build a repayment dataset before it ever has to argue with a regulator about classification.
What to watch
Three milestones over the next twelve months will tell the story. First, a debt facility announcement: without warehouse capital, the 50-to-100-student target is unreachable. Second, the first repayment cohort. Even a handful of graduates entering payback will be the first real-world data point on whether the IRR-capped ISA actually clears in the Indian outbound corridor. Third, a follow-on equity round. A priced seed in the $3 million to $5 million range, ideally with an Indian fintech-native fund alongside Plug and Play, would signal that someone with local underwriting muscle has looked at the early book and liked what they saw.
If you are an investor watching the Indian edfintech category, the question is not whether ISAs can work. It is whether Skillsvest can turn 4,500 counsellors and a 3,000-student waitlist into a repayment dataset clean enough to attract the debt capital that makes the model real. Who underwrites the second ₹50 crore?
, Cash Quintero