Edtech startup Vedantu is the latest to graduate to the coveted unicorn club after the company raised $100 million in a Series E round led by Singapore based ABC World Asia and participated by Coatue, Tiger Global, GGV Capital, Westbridge and others. This is the first capital raise for the company in 2021 and in the past 15 months.
The Bengaluru-headquartered company is the fifth EdTech (educational technology) platform to achieve this feat after Byju’s, Unacademy, Eruditus and upGrad. It is also the 28th unicorn to emerge out of India this year, amidst the unprecedented funding boom.
Founded in 2014 by Vamsi Krishna, Anand Prakash, and Pulkit Jain, Vedantu is an interactive online tutoring platform that enables teachers to provide tuition to school students over the internet. The edtech startup uses a proprietary real-time virtual learning environment named WAVE. The startup says that WAVE has come up with more than 70 parameters that facilitate the whole learning process.
Also, Read This: Navneet Education Acquires Majority Stake In Edtech Startup Genext Students
It currently provides live coaching classes for K12 students, including for entrance exams such as IIT JEE Main and Advanced for engineering and NEET for medical colleges. It also provides classes for CBSE and ICSE as well as various state boards, sample question papers, revision notes, mock tests, and previous years’ papers. SuperKids is its newest offering which offers extracurricular classes like English speaking, reading, and coding courses.
It currently gets about 35 million monthly visitors on its platform, of which about 500,000 will be paying for Vedantu by the end of the year, CEO Krishna told Moneycontrol.
“In India, online education has the potential to extend the scope of ‘Right to Education’ to students in the underserved community and capture the ‘Next Half Billion’ income group, representing over half of the country’s student population. With EdTech experiencing meteoric growth in India, Vedantu as the pioneer and category creator in LIVE online tutoring is driving the tectonic shift towards online learning,” Sugandhi Matta, Chief Impact Officer, ABC World Asia, said.
Also, Read This: Bengaluru-based Edtech Startup FlashPrep Bags USD 500k led by Venture Highway