Times Internet, GREE Ventures lead funding in education management platform Classplus

Delhi-based Classplus, provider of management systems for tutors and educational institutes, has raised $1.6 million (Rs 11.2 crore at current exchange rate) in its pre-Series A round of funding.

The round was led by Times Internet and GREE Ventures, the Singapore-based venture capital firm connected to Japanese games firm GREE, and joined by Japanese early-stage venture capital firm Spiral Ventures and previous investor Rising Stars Fund from the Netherlands.

Owned by Bunch Microtechnologies Pvt. Ltd, Classplus plans to use the funds to expand its product offerings, ramp up the leadership team and scale operations.

Classplus, formerly XPrep, offers Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) mobile solutions for independent tutors and institutes to help them run their curriculum through an app.

The company is also building a data science engine, which will leverage information on learning patterns of students and enable predictive analysis of their assessment scores to prepare them better for competitive exams.

The firm claims to have a client base of 1,200 coaching institutes across 50 cities currently.

The startup was co-founded in September 2015 by Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee graduate Mukul Rustagi (chief executive) and Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology (NSIT) graduate Bhaswat Agarwal.

Launched as XPrep, the company experimented with a number of models including being a platform to connect tutors and students before finding its fit in the SaaS model.

In September 2017, the company raised an undisclosed amount from Rising Stars; Manish Amin, co-founder of travel portal Yatra; Pallav Pandey, co-founder of telephony startup Knowlarity; and Chavi Jafa, head of business solutions, South Asia, payments firm Visa.

Yasuhiro Seo, founding partner, Spiral Ventures, said, "The Indian coaching segment is a $20 billion market. While there are a lot of firms working towards directly providing students with study material online, Classplus has taken a unique stand of empowering teachers with technology, which makes its business model scalable.”

Recent deals in ed-tech

• May 2019: Pesto, a career accelerator for software engineers in India, raised an undisclosed amount in a round led by venture capital firm Matrix Partners India. The round also saw participation from Sriharsha Majety, Rahul Jaimani and Nandan Reddy, founders of online food delivery startup Swiggy; Ritesh Malik, founder of co-working space provider Innov8; Ashish Tulsian, founder of restaurant management platform POSist; and Jack Yeung, founder of OIC Capital, among other angel investors.
• April 2019: Mumbai-based ed-tech startup WhiteHat Jr raised Rs 9 crore ($1.3 million) in a seed funding round from venture capital firm Nexus Venture Partners and early-stage investment firm Omidyar Network India Advisors.
• April 2019: E-commerce giant Flipkart chief executive Kalyan Krishnamurthy topped up his investment in Benagluru-based online learning platform Unacademy.
• March 2019: Quiz-based learning ed-tech startup iChamp raised an undisclosed amount in a pre-Series A funding round led by Raju Shukla, chief executive of Singapore-based Ariana Investment Management.