Dr Manasvi M Kamat
The Mumbai-based Edutech company, EduisFun, became the news breaker in the last week after it was successful in raising a whopping $28 Mn (Rs 200 cr) in its very first funding round.
Since the Edutech firms grossing up higher funding is not the normal norm, EduisFun became the talk of the town. Some of these high profile investors who invested in this firm were found to be from a clutch of angel investors and high net worth individuals (HNIs) like HDFC man Deepak Parekh, actor Amitabh Bachchan and veteran ad filmmaker Piyush Pandey of Ogilvy.
The edutech sector in education is fastest growing today and with increasing internet penetration and growing digitalisation, it is bound to expand. Since the tech-savvy generation of today prefers to study using technology and adopts trends fast, edutech firms are mending new ways of teaching to suit generational changes.
In the past, only high-profile edutech startups like Byju’s or Ronnie Screwvala-backed Upgrad got so many eyeballs like the EduisFun. Founded by two ex-IITians Praveen Tyagi (ex-IITD) and Jatin Solanki (ex-IITB), EduisFun is an adaptive platform which provides an enhanced gamified learning experience and uses analytics for personal performance tracking.
Eduisfun attends to school children serving lessons mapped to the CBSE and ICSE curriculums founded in 2014. It offers high-quality content for Class 1 to Class 10th CBSE/ICSE/SSC and Olympiad. The startup eliminates the use of video-based teaching by instructors and instead uses puzzles and games to impart concepts.
Eduisfun’s flagship product STEPApp is an experiential learning app that works on basic smartphones even with low data connectivity and has been designed for students of private, central and tribal schools. The company will be utilizing the funding to increase its scholarship pool, product development and expand to 1.5 mn schools across India. According to data from investment tracker Venture Intelligence, the funding EduisFun received is the fifth largest in the edutech sector in 2019.
2019 has been a good year for edutech startups with reference to the gracious funding it received. The edutech firm, Eruditus, was the first to receive angel investment in passing year 2019, starting of January. It received a modest support of $40 mn from Bertlesmann Investments and Sequoia Capital India. Subsequently in July, the edutech unicorn ‘Byju’s’ secured the largest round at $150 mn (Rs 1,067 crore) led by Qatar Investment Authority including Owl ventures and General Atlantic.
In June 2019, ‘Unacademy’ received funding of $51 mn from angel investors like the Steadview Capital, Blue Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital India among others while ‘Vedantu’ raised close to $42 mn (Rs 300 crore) in August led by Tiger Global, Trifecta Capital, Omidyarv Network, Accel India and WestBridge.
During the year-end (in the month of December 2019), ‘Springboard’ received a modest funding of $11 mn from Bluefog Capital, Pearsons, IFC and others. Yet another Edutech startup ‘Cuemath’ raised $5.5 mn in funding led by Manta Ray Ventures along with existing investors Google’s Capital G and Sequoia India. Cuemath provides after-school maths tuition classes and uses physical worksheets, quiz cards with other tablet-based in-house content by targeting students from lower kindergarten to standard 10.
2019 has also been memorable for the eight-year-old Bangalore-headquartered ‘Byjus’s’, the education startup leader for it has raised $925 mn to date. In 2019 it is also a part of a very small club of profitable startups in the nation, having earlier reported a net loss of $4 million on revenue of $69 mn in the fiscal year that ended in March 2018. In mid-December 2019 this firm posted a net profit of $2.8 mn on revenue of $188.8 mn in the financial year that ended in March this year and on a track to double its revenue to $422 million by March 31, 2020.
Byju’s helps all school-going children understand complex subjects through its app where tutors use real-life objects such as pizza and cake, has amassed 2.8 mn paying subscribers, up from 2.4 mn in July 2019. Overall, it has 40 million registered users and counts Prosus Ventures, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife General Atlantic, IFC, Lightspeed Ventures, Times Internet and Owl Ventures among its investors.
The edutech sector saw some very early-stage funding as well in 2019. The Gurugram based startup ‘Sunstone Eduversity’ running professional education programmes for students in partnership with colleges, has raised Rs 11.3 crore from a clutch of investors in its seed round. The Bengaluru-based venture capital firm Prime Venture Partners led this funding round.
A good number of edutech firms in India has announced their expansion plans in 2020, showing remarkable progress. The Mumbai-based edutech startup, Ufaber, founded in 2015 is planning to raise about $5 million from venture capital funds and strategic investors in exchange for a 10-15 per cent stake.
Smart Institute, which is primarily focussed on the Indian edutech market and a part of the Shahani Group, has raised $1.5 mn in funding from a group of HNI investors. This firm aims to expand its presence in 30 cities nationally within the next five years expecting to reach a funding amount of $30 mn by the end of 2020.
Byju’s has previously said it plans to enter the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand markets. Earlier this year, it acquired Osmo, a US-based learning startup that is popular among kids aged between five and 12, for $120 mn. Mumbai-based edutech startup WhiteHat, venture of former Discovery Networks CEO Karan Bajaj, has announced its intentions to start pushing the startup internationally. This firm is barely a year old and helps children between the age of 6 and 14 build market-ready apps, games and animations online.
It is not just Indian firms that are going abroad, Riyadh headquartered Noon Academy, one of the fastest-growing EduTech startups in the Middle East with over three million registered users, announced the launch of a standalone office in Bengaluru recently.
Overall it seems 2019 has done much good to edutech startups in India. From creating platforms to understanding the way teaching is done to enhancing interaction between teacher and students, education startups are shaking the industry. With the kind of success in 2019, there is no doubt that the year 2020 will present a lucrative opportunity for edutech startups and venture capitalists in India to expand their roots.
