Uolo Edtech Pvt. Ltd, a platform that enables schools and parents to communicate with each other, said Tuesday it has raised a pre-Series A funding round led by Omidyar Network India and Blume Ventures.
The company will use the funds to strengthen its team and enhance its offerings to schools and students, Uolo said in a statement.
Uolo ties up with private schools to bring the teacher-student-parent community online through its mobile app. It also helps students continue to learn online after school hours. The company currently works with more than 2,000 schools and 1 million students in more than 200 cities across India.
Uolo co-founder and CEO Pallav Pandey said the company aims to bring 20,000 schools and 10 million students on its platform in the next two years.
Pandey, an IIT Kanpur graduate, was previously chief product officer with Elara Group, which houses online real estate firms Housing.com, PropTiger and Makaan. The company’s other co-founders are Ankur Pandey, who was previously with Intel, and Siddharth P. Singh, who was vice president of engineering at Elara Group.
Uolo was originally launched in 2014 by Ankur Pandey and Badrish Agarwal, an IIM Ahmedabad alumnus. Agarwal left in 2018, according to his LinkedIn profile. The company seems to have gone through a management restructuring this year.
In 2016, VCCircle had reported that Uolo had raised around Rs 1.4 crore in seed funding from Purvi Ventures, Sunstone Business School director Rajul Garg and Vipin Arora.
The investment in Uolo is another example of the continued interest that education-technology has evinced from investors this year as the need for online classes have grown because of the coronavirus pandemic. Startups serving several segments have raised cheques of varying sizes from both domestic and international backers.
Both Omidyar Network and Blume Ventures have backed other edtech startups. Omidyar's most notable bet in the space was Whitehat Jr, which was bought by Byju's earlier this year. Blume-backed Unacademy turned a unicorn in September after a new funding round led by SoftBank.
In other major deals in the ed-tech segment after the virus outbreak, Vedantu scooped up $100 million in Series D funding led by US-based investment firm Coatue Management and Toppr raised $46 million in its Series D round of funding led by UAE-based family investment office Foundation Holdings.