Jaipur- and Bengaluru-based Multibhashi, which operates an eponymous mobile application for teaching English and Indian languages, has raised an undisclosed amount in a seed round of funding from angel investor Aniruddha Malpani and Startup Oasis, the startup’s founder told VCCircle.
Startup Oasis is a joint initiative of Rajasthan State Industrial Development and Investment Corporation and Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship, IIM Ahmedabad.
The firm will use the funds to expand the team, add more courses to its platform and for product development, said Anuradha Agarwal.
The funds will give Multibhashi an operational runway for almost a year, Agarwal said, adding that the startup will hit the market for its next fundraising within eight months.
The development was first reported by The Economic Times.
Multibhashi was founded in February 2016 by Agarwal. It launched its product in December 2016 and was incorporated in April 2017. The firm helps blue-collar workers improve English communication skills. Though the firm’s registered office is in Jaipur, its core team functions out of Bangalore.
The company operates a mobile app which enables users to learn spoken English, Hindi, Tamil and Kannada. While English is taught through Hindi, Tamil and Kannada, the three Indian languages are taught through English. The app, which is available on Android, has seen more than 1 lakh downloads so far. The firm follows a freemium model where users have to pay for certain features of the product.
“While learning English language is desirable, it becomes a necessity in the context of work. We also want to bring the next set of online users who will be mostly non-English speaking audience, into the mainstream,†said Agarwal.
Besides some standard modules, the firm also provides one-to-one sessions to users through chat and over phone. It also plans to reach out to business-to-business (B2B) clients.
“There is a significant potential to create a lot of job role-related modules in the B2B segment. We are in advanced talks with a few B2B players which employ a lot of blue-collar workers†said Agarwal.
An alumnus of International School of Informatics & Management (IIIM), Jaipur, Agarwal previously worked with Dexter Capital Advisors and Agilent Technologies, among others.
In the broader language learning space, English tutoring startup Kings Learning, which operates mobile app Enguru, raised funding worth $2.5 million (around Rs 16 crore) from Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, the philanthropic venture of Dell Technologies founder’s family along with unnamed US-based tech investors, last month