Ed-tech firm Classplus, which runs a classroom management app for tutors, has raised Rs 11 crore ($1.6 million) in its pre-series A round of funding led by Times Internet, a subsidiary of media house Bennett Coleman and Co. Ltd, and GREE Ventures, a Singapore-based venture capital fund, a company statement said.
The company’s existing investors Spiral Ventures, a Japanese VC firm, and Rising Stars Fund from the Netherlands also participated in the round, the statement added.
The company will use the capital to expand its product offerings, ramp up its leadership team and scale up its operations.
It is also building a data science engine, which will analyse the learning patterns of students and offer insights about how they can better prepare themselves for competitive exams.
Run by Bunch Microtechnologies Pvt. Ltd, the venture, which was formerly known as XPrep, was founded in 2018 by Mukul Rustagi along with Bhaswat Agarwal.
Prior to setting up Classplus, Rustagi was a derivatives analyst at stock market research firm Futures First, while Agarwal was a technology strategist at software giant Microsoft.
Classplus’ mobile-first platform allows private coaching institutes and their tutors to streamline content distribution, payments, communication and online assessments on a single platform. Tutors can conduct online assessments on the app and identify each students’ learning gaps and track their performance through the course of the academic year.
“Classplus has emerged as the category leader in this segment with coaching centres using our mobile SaaS for their classroom courses as well as to distribute text and video learning modules online,” said Rustagi, CEO at Classplus.
“While there are a lot of firms working towards directly providing students with study material online, Classplus has taken a unique stand of empowering teachers with technology, which makes their business model scalable,” said Yasuhiro Seo, founding partner, Spiral Ventures.
Within 15 months of its launch, the company has solidified its base with over 1,200 coaching centres as its clients in over 50 cities across the country.
Deals in ed-tech
The broader ed-tech sector has received considerable investor interest in recent months.
Last week, venture capital firm Matrix Partners led an investment round in ed-tech startup Pesto, which runs a career accelerator for software engineering talent in the country.
In March this year, Byju’s raised $31.3 million in a fresh round of funding led by existing investors General Atlantic and Tencent Holdings.
Around the same time, quiz-based learning ed-tech startup iChamp raised pre-Series A funding in a round led by Raju Shukla, chief executive officer at Singapore-based Ariana Investment Management.
In the same month, eShiksa, a startup which helps educational institutions manage their digital operations, raised funding from Mumbai-based investment firm Mentor Capital as part of an extended seed round.
Last December, South African technology conglomerate Naspers led a $540-million (Rs 3,855 crore then) investment round in Byju’s.
In December 2018, Toppr, another well-funded ed-tech startup, raised $35 million (Rs 245 crore then) in a Series C funding round from new and previous investors.
