This Startup Bagged $2.5 Million Investment; Helps Accessing Supplementary Education to Indian Students

The Noida-based company, mobile operating system provider for private tutoring businesses, Classplus has lately raised a pre-series A round of $2.5 million from Surge, a scale-up program by Sequoia Capital India and Blume Ventures. 

Other investors, who participated in the funding round, include leading angel investors--Alvin Tse, General Manager at Xiaomi-Indonesia, Kunal Shah, Founder at CRED and Freecharge, and Eric Kwan, Partner at Locus Ventures, amongst others. 

“We caught on to the smartphone internet wave quite early and realised this might be the de-facto medium via which tutors and students would use the internet as a productivity tool in the future”, Mukul Rustagi, Co-Founder at Classplus, said.

“This fundraise will be primarily used to ramp-up our technology. We are jumping orbitals and we welcome strong pilots to steer the rocketship. We are currently a team of 150+ and looking forward to bolstering it across engineering, product and business verticals”, Rustagi added.

Classplus, through its mobile OS platform, aims to integrate a small fragmented market of tutors by assisting them in enabling communication, payments, and calibration. Besides this, the startup offers online learning programmes on its platform which makes a two-fold increase in its online content repository.

Empowering Hyperlocal Tuition Centres in India

The Noida-based startup is helping marginal tutors and tuition centres in expanding its business through its e-commerce channels. Its platform acts as a new-age digital space for educational content and products, wherein tutors create video content and online assessments and later, make it available to their students.

“At Blume, we are excited by Mukul & Bhaswat's vision of a platform that empowers the hundreds of thousands of tuition and tests prep centres throughout India to better serve their students, thereby enhancing learning for students, and improving earning opportunities for these entrepreneurs who run these tuition and test prep centres”, Sajith Pai, who heads edtech investments at Blume Ventures, said.

Classplus, which was founded in 2018 by Mukul Rustagi and Bhaswat Agarwal, has its presence in over 50 Indian cities. It offers a platform that helps all coaching centres to take their brick and mortar setups online. At present, it has a wide nexus of over 3000 tutors across its well serviced-cities. Its portal is essentially employed to cater to the needs of more than 500k students daily and also, perform pre-classroom as well as post-classroom engagement.

Changing Course of the Education in India

Over the years, private tuitions have plummeted tremendously because of the Indian education system’s inability to be adaptive. Owing to which, teaching in mainstream schools has deteriorated whilst on the flip side, the exam system has remained constant. To pass school examinations and crack competitive exams,  students are relying on supplementary education like a coaching centre or hiring an individual tutor.   

Consequently, hyperlocal tutor centres have gradually become a prime way to attain supplementary academic assistance. According to a study, over 70 million Indian students take tuitions every year, abiding teacher and pupil culture, in turn, assimilating academic lessons that mainstream schools fail to provide. 

One out of every four students in India takes private tuition and in a couple of states more than three out of every four students, or over 75 per cent, opt for it, reported Mint citing a report by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO)

“In this survey...it is noted that in states like Tripura (around 81 per cent) and West Bengal (around 78 per cent) majority of students were taking private coaching (combining school education and higher education), whereas at all-India level 1/4th of students were taking private coaching," the NSSO survey said in the report. 

Addressing this problem, many young entrepreneurs have disrupted the education space and formulated their business model, stressing on pain points that Indian students are complaining about. Education technology companies like BYJU’s, WizKlub and Eupheus Learning, among others are offering online tutoring services to the students. By doing so, today’s edtech companies are offering quality education at student’s convenience. 

Recent Investments in The Edtech Sector 

As investors vision a promising surge in the Indian edtech sector, more investments are happening in the niche. General Atlantic has lately pumped money about INR 1,420 crore into BYJU’s. The investment has been deemed as an important component of the funding round, which is underway presently. 

Online tutoring startup, Vedantu has also secured $24 million in a Series C funding round. GGV Capital led the round of the edtech startup. The existing investors have also participated in the funding round, reported Inc42. 

Another edtech platform, Coding Ninjas proclaimed that it has received $5.2 million investment in series A funding round from conglomerate company, Info Edge India Limited, reported Tech Asia.