Ed-tech startup Classplus said on Tuesday it has raised $2.5 million (Rs 17.8 crore) in its pre-Series A round of funding from Blume Ventures and Sequoia Capital India’s Surge programme for early-stage ventures.
Angel investors such as Kunal Shah, founder of Cred and Freecharge; Alvin Tse, general manager at Xiaomi-Indonesia; and Eric Kwan, partner at seed fund Locus Ventures; also participated in the funding round.
The Noida-based startup, which is operated by Bunch Microtechnologies Pvt. Ltd, will primarily use the funds to ramp up its technology, Classplus co-founder Mukul Rustagi said in a statement.
The company also intends to expand its team across engineering, product and business verticals, he added.
Classplus, which was formerly known as XPrep, was founded in 2018 by Rustagi and Bhaswat Agarwal. Prior to setting up Classplus, Rustagi was a derivatives analyst at stock market research firm Futures First. Agarwal was a technology strategist at software giant Microsoft.
The startup is a mobile-first, software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for private coaching centres. It helps coaching centres take their business online and streamline all their communication, content distribution, payments and online assessments through its app. Classplus claims it has over 3,000 tutors across more than 50 Indian cities, catering to over 500,000 students on a regular basis.
The ed-tech startup had raised Rs 11 crore in May last year in a funding round led by Times Internet Ltd, a subsidiary of media house Bennett, Coleman and Co. Ltd, and GREE Ventures, a Singapore-based venture capital fund. Previously, the company had raised funding from Japanese VC firm Spiral Ventures and the Netherlands’ Rising Stars Fund.
Ed-tech deals
The larger ed-tech segment in India has been the object of investor attention over the last few years. The most heavily funded startup is Byju's, which is part of the unicorn club of startups to be valued at $1 billion.
Toppr, Unacademy and Vedantu are among other ed-tech startups that have also raised significant funding.
Last month, Gurugram-based DoubtNut raised $15 million in its Series A round of funding led by Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings. Sequoia's Surge was an early investor in DoubtNut.
Also last month, growth-stage investor Iron Pillar led a Rs 60-crore (around $8.3 million) Series B round in Testbook, which operates a platform focused on government examination preparations.
In January, DSG Consumer Partners and Blume Ventures co-led an investment in Leverage EdTech Pvt. Ltd, which operates university admissions-focussed startup Leverage Edu.
