Picus Capital, Paytm president infuse $3 mn in edtech platform Lido Learning

Online classroom platform Lido Learning, owned and operated by Quality Tutorials, has raised $3 million in a fresh funding round from Madhur Deora, president of digital payments firm Paytm, and Picus Capital, a German venture capital fund launched by Rocket Internet co-founder Alexander Samwer.

"Lido Learning has built a very comprehensive and targeted product to take the Indian tutoring market online and to deliver real value to its students. The tremendous growth in the months since launch has proofed the great product-market fit they have found," Florian Reichert, a partner at Picus Capital, said.

The deal marks Picus Capital’s first ed-tech investment. Fintech firm MoneyOnClick and healthtech startup Meddo are two of its other investments in India.

Madhur Deora, who joined Paytm as its chief financial officer in October 2016, was promoted as its president in August last year. Prior to joining Paytm, he served as managing director in Citigroup’s investment banking business.

In November last year, the startup had secured $3 million in a Series A funding round from Ronnie Screwvala, promoter of education platform Upgrad, and Ananth Narayanan, chief executive at e-pharmacy Medlife, among other HNIs (high net worth individual) investors. JK Tyres managing director Vikrampati Singhania, Shaadi.com founder Anupam Mittal and Patni Wealth Advisors managing director Arihant Patni were some of the other investors in the round.

Founded in April 2019 by Sahil Sheth, Lido Learning offers live small-group tuition and personalised coaching online for students between classes 5 and 9, in mathematics and science from both the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) and the Indian Certificate of Secondary Education (ICSE) boards. Its features include interactive sessions for feedback and doubt clearing, quizzes and immersive games. Every session has a maximum student to teacher ratio of 6:1, the company claimed.

“Considering the current global pandemic, learning online has become the need of the hour. This is pulling the Indian market towards adopting online tutorials much faster than initially expected and is a huge tailwind enabling us to become a dominant category creator within a short span of time,” Sheth said.

India’s top three edtech startups – Byju’s, Vedantu and Unacademy – raised large growth rounds last month. 

Unacademy raised $110 million in a growth funding round from General Atlantic and Facebook. New York headquartered private equity General Atlantic also infused an additional $200 million into edtech unicorn Byju’s, valuing the company at $8.2 billion. 

Live online tutoring startup Vedantu raised an additional $24 million as part of its Series C round, led by Menlo Park, California, and Shanghai-based venture capital firm GGV Capital. 

Byju’s had raised $200 million from New York-headquartered alternative investments firm Tiger Global Management in January.